The Gaia Conspiracy Continues

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The Gaia Conspiracy Continues
By Evan Pritchard

Two different sets of facts are beginning to emerge in the media concerning Global Warming; one, that it is really happening, and two, that there really is a cover-up about it really happening. Of course the media plays this game where it cooperates with the cover-up until a certain point, and then it reports on those people covering it up, in a sense, reporting on its own reporting. The Washington Post, however has taken a courageous stance of late and has outed lots of closet greens.

Here is the Washington Post article on the cover-up of James Hansen. It is quite remarkable on how critical it is of the Bush administration, and with what placement. This tone has continued during this past week unabated.

Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff WriterThursday, April 6, 2006; Page A27
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.
These scientists -- working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. -- say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, point climate researchers -- unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters -- were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.
"There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated -- I see that."
Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply.
Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' "
Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a film crew from the BBC, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and journalists.
"We've always had the policy, it just hasn't been enforced," Laborde said. "It's important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast."
Several times, however, agency officials have tried to alter what these scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab director told him participants could not use the term "climate change" in conference paper's titles and abstracts. Tans and others disregarded that advice.
None of the scientists said political appointees had influenced their research on climate change or disciplined them for questioning the administration. Indeed, several researchers have received bigger budgets in recent years because President Bush has focused on studying global warming rather than curbing greenhouse gases. NOAA's budget for climate research and services is now $250 million, up from $241 million in 2004.
The assertion that climate scientists are being censored first surfaced in January when James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the New York Times and The Washington Post that the administration sought to muzzle him after he gave a lecture in December calling for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin issued new rules recently that make clear that its scientists are free to talk to members of the media about their scientific findings and to express personal interpretations of those findings.
Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States," he told the crowd.

The Missing Piece


This is in addition to the Gaia coverup follies I reported on last week. There has been at least one major breaking story every day. I’m sure that its all planned that way for our entertainment. But through all this expose extravaganza, one big chunk is yet to be uncovered by the mainstream, and that is Lovelock’s new book, Revenge of Gaia. I discussed this book in my just released article in the April – May issue of NY Spirit, “Earth In Crisis” (with William Meyers) in some detail, based on reviews, and interviews, and it turns out, seems to be the only mention in print in the United States of this book.

Why do reports on ice sheets melting and glaciers vanishing and NASA administrators being tortured like Allied spies in Nazi Germany get coverage, but Revenge of Gaia does not? Why the special treatment? Because its good? In fact, that’s probably part of it….. It’s true, and the truer it is the worse it is and the greater the liability. Is just like the movie The Insider with Russell Crowe, who is probably on the phone to his agent right now saying, “I didn’t get an oscar statue for playing Jeffry Wygand (big tobacco’s leading whistle blower) . Let me do James Hansen!”

I traveled to Canada to obtain an imported copy of “Revenge of Gaia” from England, and it was expensive and was selling out. If you go on AmazonUK and pay by credit card in Sterling Pounds, it will probably come out to about $35, maybe more. It might be a good investment in the future. But by the time it arrives, the CE levels might have gone up five points.

One thing some people won’t like about the book is that it is strongly in favor of Nuclear power plants. He makes a good case, but he comes off sounding a bit biased. In fact, on Easter Sunday, Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore published an article in the Washington Post (who is breaking a lot of these stories these days) saying that he was wrong about nuclear power, and that it is the only way to replace coal based generators. I will include that article later. So that particular obstacle to the book’s acceptance is quickly dwindling, because in fact, he’s right. There have been no significant incidents involving nuclear power in the US; three mile island was a close call, but protective measures did their job. And yet no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1980s. This has meant trillions of dollars for the coal companies and for big oil. Coal generators also produce 36 percent of US emissions, 10% of global emissions as well. There are 600 coal fired electric plants in the US, which is 600 too many.

But that’s not why the Lovelock book is blacked out. It is a missing person because it mentions blue green algae and we aren’t supposed to know about that slimy little secret here in the US. The situation with blue green algae approaches a kind of sketchy certainty (within a huge ball park the size of the earth) one which demands specific actions which will mean less billions for oil companies and coal companies. Apparently cars are more important than people.

You see, little blue green algae don’t like cars, or at least what comes out of cars. Why do we care about a bunch of slimes? They outnumber us. And they run the planet, not us.

Carbon emissions were at about 89 ppm before the industrial revolution. They are now at about 390 ppm and rising steadily. Temperatures have risen about 2.7 degrees centigrade globally since then, (from about 56o F to about 60 o F) although people argue over this, but the temperatures are also rising steadily, some say in lock step with CE levels. This is in spite of blue green algae all over the world which has been busy trying to suck in CEs and keep the temperature down as well. According to a number of different computer models of climate dynamics, when the CEs reach 500 ppm, the temperature will reach 16o Centigrate, or about 62o F, and the blue green algae all over the world will die. This is a slight oversimplification, but that’s what the math tells us. Even with a margin of error of 10% we are still in trouble, especially if we end up on the short side of that 10%.

The algae will die mainly because the increased heat will create an ocean layer of warm water that algae can’t live in, too thick for the light to reach the algae. This will happen to varying degrees at various latitudes, in fact it is already happening. Just recently there are reports of blue green algae disappearing in the northern oceans. Just letting you know.

Running a climate without algae is like running an engine without coolant. According to the models, when the algae crashes, the temperature soars from 16C to 24C or from 62 o F to 78o F. I accidentally turned up the heating unit on the fish tank when I was a kid and left it on. When I came back a few hours later, all the fish were dead. The difference in temperature was not much different than that in Lovelocks’ computer model. I will never forget the sight of all those dead fish. I wish you could have seen them. It put me in a frame of mind to pay attention to details and to hear about warming oceans and other mayhem forty years later. That’s what will happen to the earth only worse. As the dead algae decays, it releases more methane and more carbon dioxide and that heats up the atmosphere a whole lot more. The great changes in temperature create huge wind storms around the earth, and deserts will form almost everywhere, with some rapidity. The 50% increase in hurricane activity of late has been linked to one degree rise in ocean temperatures. Imagine what 16 more degrees will do. Earth will begin to look more like the other planets in the solar system, the ones we can’t survive on either.

Another factor to consider, if you’re planning to wait out the storm, is that oceans expand considerably when heated. Some say that the ocean water has expanded 8 inches since the 1800s, so when experts say that the water volume has increased by an infinitesimal amount so far due to ice caps melting, that’s true, but misleading. If the algae goes away, we may see the water rise several feet rather quickly. And the heat will only continue to rise, as most of the things that keep planets cool get toasted in the new atmosphere, a scenario in fact just as bizarre as the different one posited in Day After Tomorrow, which took a reverse hypothesis, just so they could make a joke about Mexico.

Now Canada’s leader Harper is talking about cutting all programs to fund global warming management programs, but is leaving the bureaucrats in place with nothing to do but take home a salary. That’ll work.

This article appeared April 18th, 2006
Ottawa plan hacks green programs
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT AND MICHAEL DEN TANDT
The new Conservative government has decided to slash spending on Environment Canada programs designed to fight global warming by 80 per cent, and wants cuts of 40 per cent in the budgets devoted to climate change at other ministries, according to cabinet documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The documents also say that the Conservatives' campaign promise of tax breaks for transit passes would cost up to $2-billion over five years, but would result in an insignificant cut in greenhouse-gas emissions because the incentives are expected to spur only a small increase in the number of people willing to trade using cars for buses and subways.
The section of the documents on the budget cuts, written by an unidentified government official after a cabinet meeting in late March that approved the reductions, also said the Tories want to try to claw back $260-million the Liberals had pledged to the United Nations to fund its international climate-change programs.
Federal funding for wind power, considered by environmentalists to be one of the cleanest new energy sources, "is also uncertain," the documents said.
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Ryan Sparrow, a spokesman for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, refused to confirm or deny the details in the leak, and said the government hasn't finalized its decisions on climate change.
"Once there is an announcement to be made, we'll make one," Mr. Sparrow said.
The documents were obtained by the opposition Liberals and bolster previous reports that large-scale cuts have been under way in climate-change programs, such as the highly visible One Tonne Challenge, which had much of its funding abruptly axed without public announcement in late March.
The Tories have indicated that they are ambivalent about the Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change, planning to neither pull out of the treaty nor meet its emission-reduction targets.
According to the documents, the Tories have yet to develop their unique Canadian-based set of actions.
"No process has been put in place to determine next steps on climate change or to develop the new 'made in Canada' climate plan," the documents said.
The documents said that while the Tories are trying to save money by cutting the programs designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they won't cut government staff positions, so most of the money earmarked for climate change will be going to salaries for bureaucrats.
"Only $375-million was approved for climate spending, with most of the dollars covering staff salaries until the new government determines next steps.
"What is clear is that staff will have little to do and that they will have no budgets to spend over the next year and that more cuts are coming."
According to the documents, the programs are being eliminated to help fund tax cuts, including the GST reduction the Tories pledged during the election, and to fund the transit-pass scheme.
The global-warming programs are being eliminated even though a Treasury Board review of government spending found that the vast majority of 166 such programs run by Ottawa were considered cost effective.
The review, which was begun by the Liberals and completed last fall, found only 22 programs were ineffective. The Treasury Board information was supposed to be used to reallocate funding from programs that weren't working to those that were achieving better results.
The Liberals did not deal with the review before the election, and many federal initiatives didn't have budget allocations after March 31, the end of the government's fiscal year.
Environmentalists reacted angrily to the cuts. John Bennett, a spokesman for the Sierra Club of Canada, accused the Tories of having a "slash and burn campaign."
The documents also show that senior officials in the Environment Ministry have told the government that its proposed tax credit for transit users will have virtually no impact on greenhouse-gas emissions and only a small effect on riders.
"A wide range of data suggests that people are not very responsive to changes in transit fares," said a memo prepared for Ms. Ambrose last week by officials in the office of her deputy minister. ". . . while the ridership impacts of the tax incentives are not known with precision, analysis suggests they will be low."
The six-page memo outlines five transit tax-incentive options, ranging from a 16-per-cent tax credit for all fares, at a projected cost of $2-billion over five years, to a credit for monthly pass holders only, at $1-billion, to the same credit for high-school students only, at a cost of $90-million.
The memo makes clear that the second option is the one the government prefers. But its benefits to transit users may be nullified, the memo states, because "it could be quite easy for the transit authorities to raise their fares to absorb the benefit of the tax credit."
The Canadian Urban Transit Association has estimated that the proposed tax break would increase transit use by up to 30 per cent by 2016. But in another Environment Minister memo drafted for Ms. Ambrose, ministry officials say that, based on a 1997 Canadian study, as well as a U.S. Department of Labour survey in 2004, use can be expected to increase between 2 per cent and 4 per cent. That means the effect on emissions will be negligible, the documents show.
Moving Right Along
One thing Canada has going for it is that it is building nuclear power plants. In the past, this has been controversial among the environmentally in the know, and some have foreseen possible civil war and even revolution over this issue as the blue green threshold of death approaches. But with the miraculous Easter morning resurrection of nuclear power, with GreenPeace founder Patrick Moore playing the part of John the Baptist, in that morning’s edition of the Washington Post, it is likely that such delays and battles will probably be averted. It will however take a lot of time to tear down 600 coal plants and build 600 nuclear ones in their place, remembering of course to clean up all the nuke waste and stuff it into swimming pools afterwards.

Here is that article in full. I suggest you read the whole thing. It agrees with Lovelock on the essential issue of nuclear power, but is more even handed concerning passive sources, which is admittedly a flaw in the “Revenge” book.

Going Nuclear
A Green Makes the Case
By Patrick Moore
Sunday, April 16, 2006; Page B01
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.
I say that guardedly, of course, just days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had enriched uranium. "The nuclear technology is only for the purpose of peace and nothing else," he said. But there is widespread speculation that, even though the process is ostensibly dedicated to producing electricity, it is in fact a cover for building nuclear weapons.
And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country.
What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do -- prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.
Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America's electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that's not including the nuclear workers). Although I don't live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp.
And I am not alone among seasoned environmental activists in changing my mind on this subject. British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Stewart Brand, founder of the "Whole Earth Catalog," says the environmental movement must embrace nuclear energy to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunication from the anti-nuclear priesthood: The late British Bishop Hugh Montefiore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth, was forced to resign from the group's board after he wrote a pro-nuclear article in a church newsletter.
There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. When I attended the Kyoto climate meeting in Montreal last December, I spoke to a packed house on the question of a sustainable energy future. I argued that the only way to reduce fossil fuel emissions from electrical production is through an aggressive program of renewable energy sources (hydroelectric, geothermal heat pumps, wind, etc.) plus nuclear. The Greenpeace spokesperson was first at the mike for the question period, and I expected a tongue-lashing. Instead, he began by saying he agreed with much of what I said -- not the nuclear bit, of course, but there was a clear feeling that all options must be explored.
Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.
That's not to say that there aren't real problems -- as well as various myths -- associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration:
· Nuclear energy is expensive. It is in fact one of the least expensive energy sources. In 2004, the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future.
· Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.) · Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
· Nuclear reactors are vulnerable to terrorist attack. The six-feet-thick reinforced concrete containment vessel protects the contents from the outside as well as the inside. And even if a jumbo jet did crash into a reactor and breach the containment, the reactor would not explode. There are many types of facilities that are far more vulnerable, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets.
· Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difficult to address, as the example of Iran shows. But just because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use.
Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.
The only practical approach to the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is to put it higher on the international agenda and to use diplomacy and, where necessary, force to prevent countries or terrorists from using nuclear materials for destructive ends. And new technologies such as the reprocessing system recently introduced in Japan (in which the plutonium is never separated from the uranium) can make it much more difficult for terrorists or rogue states to use civilian materials to manufacture weapons.
The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles. In addition, the Clean Air Council reports that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. These pollutants are eroding the health of our environment, producing acid rain, smog, respiratory illness and mercury contamination.
Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2emissions annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support a move in that direction.
pmoore@greenspirit.com
I have yet to quote from the April 3rd issue of TIME magazine directly in these articles, but it is a must read. That was the issue in which a great number of burning stories about the new acceleration in global warming were first broken into the mainstream, presumably against some opposition from mysterious forces that had clobbered some rather hefty wanna-be green publishers. It was as impressive as the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence in that regard.

In a few days I will release the third edition of my Proposal for Addressing Climate Change. Thank you all for your continuing advice. We certainly need to do something, and there are many things we can do that will work. I am trying to find someone who will go on the record to say how many trees of what species are sufficient to create enough oxygen for one person during the leafing season. Please send me any tidbits on that. I also plan to publish some time soon a review of Revenge of Gaia.

Watch for Eliot Spitzer’s Earth Day Speech on Saturday, April 22nd, at 5 PM. He has the best record of any elected official in the US on environmental issues. He plans to talk about global warming. Let us respect his courage on this. It is still not politically safe ground to tread for a candidate, and a victory would open doors for other political leaders.