# Interest group forums > Energy and Resource Conservation Forum >  Green power

## Graeme

Wind power is very topical at the moment, following the recent visit to South Africa of a Danish representative punting this means of electricity generation.

Much is being written about wind and solar power, but it would seem to me that there is no coherent plan to put the two together.  Wind power only produces electricity when the wind blows.  This is about 15% of the time.   Denmark has an arrangement with Norway and Germany to supply electricity during the 85% of the time when there is not enough wind to turn its turbines.  Similarly, solar power is produced only when the sun shines.

A new pump storage scheme is expected to come on stream in Tubatse in Mpumalanga in about 2014.  These schemes operate by pumping water from one dam to another dam at a higher altitude and then letting the water run back down to the lower dam via turbines which generate electricity.  Such a scheme has been running from the Spionkop dam for some time now.  The advantage of these schemes is that the output is beautifully controllable, feeding electricity into the National Grid just when it is wanted during peak demand times.

It would seem to make a lot of sense to erect wind power turbines and solar power installations very close to these pump storage facilities so that the stop/go power produced by them would not require incur expensive transmission costs, and could be used to pump water instead of being fed directly into the grid - or is that asking too much of inter-departmental cooperation?

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## duncan drennan

The Palmiet pumped storage scheme has been going for some time, although it is much smaller than the two you mentioned (around 400MW). What they typically do is use excess energy to pump the water up (turning a coal fired generator on and off to regulate generating capacity is not particularly efficient). Another use of these facilities is to regulate power factor on the grid.

One thing that I am not sure about with any of these facilities is how long they can run for, i.e. energy capacity.

The most effective way to use these facilities is to store *excess* energy that is available on the grid (regardless of the source). The stored excess can then be used to supplement the grid when necessary. The source of the energy isn't really important, as you would rather use it directly if it is available.

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## Superscenic

I live in Cape town. What I can say with absolute certainty is that we have plenty of wind and much much more than 15 %. We also have plenty of sun. When the sun isnt shining, and the wind isn't blowing theres plenty of big wave action.

I also heard that in Denmark they actually switch their wind turbines off sometimes because they generate too much power and the council makes a loss.

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## 3x-a-d3-u5

> I live in Cape town. What I can say with absolute certainty is that we have plenty of wind and much much more than 15 %. We also have plenty of sun. When the sun isnt shining, and the wind isn't blowing theres plenty of big wave action.
> 
> I also heard that in Denmark they actually switch their wind turbines off sometimes because they generate too much power and the council makes a loss.


Hey Superscenic, Have you seen the wind turbines at darling? They are used (i think) to substitute some of cape towns power. See here: http://www.southafrica.info/about/su...rm-darling.htm

I would like to see some wave power generation though, we have plenty of unused waves (From a surfers point of view  :Wink: ).

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Superscenic (25-Feb-09)

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## Graeme

I got Denmark's figures from an article about Wind Power in last week's Engineering News. This publication does not usually get that sort of thing wrong.  No mention there about having to switch the turbines off during high winds.

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## duncan drennan

Graeme, you might enjoy this story about a new liquid battery which is in development.

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## Dave A

It's amazing how much progress there has been in battery technology of late.

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## Superscenic

It's happening YAY!!
here are some alternative designs in Digg: http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2009/...ible-to-build/

And here is the link about Denmark producing TOO MUCH power with wind:  http://got2begreen.com/green-infrast...ch-wind-power/

"In western Denmark, the price of electricity can sometimes drop to 0 on a windy day which leaves utilities trying to find ways to offload the excess power. What a “good” problem to have!"

http://www.metaefficient.com/cars/da...ind-power.html

"In western Denmark, the price of electricity can drop to zero on a windy day, leaving utilities scrambling to offload excess power or take a financial hit."

Love those wind turbine farms that are now being build in the sea to lessen impact on the countryside and their species. Check those big blue sea expanses with Dali-Like giant white flowers bobbing up and down, so Surreal.

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## twinscythe12332

are there any notable impacts that happen due to these turbines? for example, would a 30 km/h wind hit the turbines, and slow down to a 28km/h wind?

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## Superscenic

http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/wres/pwr.htm

heres a wind speed / output graph from The Danish wind industry foundation.

If thats any help :Confused: 

I think there are many areas wich will still be improved upon. My personal issue is more the birds that get taken out by the blades. That is a huge problem apparently for Danes. They can spin at scary high speeds and birds can't always see them. That why I like the vertical stack design more, its not so pretty but it needs no maintanance or output dampers.

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## twinscythe12332

yeah, my take on the whole matter is that anything we do, we are going to affect the earth some way or another. I don't know if anyone has seen that one short on discovery channel about the mirrors pointing towards a centre pillar with a solar panel. the heat that creates must be intense! wouldn't that cause some sort of reduction in water vapour in the air? what happens if a bird casually tries to land there? 

and with the turbines, it does have the ability to trim down local bird populations, as superscenic points out. 

I do see the point in green technologies, I just also feel that there is an almost "no consequences" mentality about them. there are consequences, just not on the scale of fossil fuel plants and the likes.

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## wynn

Off the Eastern Cape Coast near East London we have a Continental Shelf that stretches a few Kilometers out to sea before it falls to the depths.
This Shelf is swept by a strong coastal current 24/7/365 
There is a proposition to situate any number of submarine generators as is necessary to run the electricity needs of the country.
This would be green, sustainable, cheap to install, run and maintain.

The objections by Politicians is, 'What is in it for me?'

Perhaps the answer to our energy needs is a new Government?

 :Mad:

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## duncan drennan

Wynn, do you know who the people are making that proposal?

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## insulin

One needs to be open-minded and unfortunately government is a monitory system designed to keep the money slave inline. The truth is electronics is at a point where it needs little power to function. There are other ways to generate power other then wind and sun power. There is a system today that allow us to harness the power of rising hot air! So the truth is industry needs us to be dependent on antiquated technology because industry needs you the money slave to PAY them money. I recommend you open your eyes and see that government do NOT control anything. Industry controls everything! 


There is no grater fool then a working man thinking that he is free for we are all slaves to the system.  :Mad:   :Banghead:

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## Dave A

> There is a system today that allow us to harness the power of rising hot air!


I suggest we install a unit over parliament.  :Big Grin:

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## Superscenic

> I suggest we install a unit over parliament.


Could be dangerous...Let's look at the properties of the hot air over parliament:

Hot air rising from parliament might smell suspiciously similar to the Methane rising from a pig farm. Often it smells like a rat. It is also highly flammable and extremely volatile, often reinventing itself radically between observations. It is also incredibly dense and subject to long periods of inactivity and inertia.

This hot air is deceptive in nature and mimics the properties of substances completely opposite in design and makeup.

When attempting to contain the substance within a workable environment it reacts with bizarre displays that defy reason and the very laws of science.

Otherwise it only responds to large amounts of gold which rapidly disappears leaving only useless residues.

It constantly tries to transform into an even more hazardous form.

Observers agree that the hot air multiplies when being scrutinized. Clouds of the stuff peak to dangerous levels just before election time then dissipates completely before building up again .

Sounds utterly useless to me.
Mmm...could it be that we've stumbled upon the real cause of global warming?

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Dave A (05-Mar-09), Graeme (06-Mar-09)

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## garthu

:Rofl:  :Clap:

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## 3x-a-d3-u5

:Big Grin:  Thats pretty good!

Incase you don;t know what a vertical turbine looks like, as i didn't this is it: 
http: 
From http://www.reuk.co.uk/Vertical-Wind-...tor-Blades.htm

These also interested me:
Mag-Wind Vertical Axis Turbine for your Home 
world's largest wind turbine generator

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Superscenic (06-Mar-09)

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## insulin

Development of these technologies is important because look at the mining industry they are scarring the face of South Africa! They are hurting us!!!! Our health! Yet they are paying us money! MONEY and yes more MONEY! Because pieces of paper can fix anything right! Well you are in for a nasty surprise because our air is becoming unfit to breath! Our food is becoming unfit to eat! And yet we allow them to feed us these poisons because we need the MONEY!!!!

The truth is we donât need it. We as a human race must turn to industry and say NO! No more! Can we? No because we will lose our jobs... What if I am to tell you that we donât need money? That we have the knowhow and technology to supply the world! With food, fuel, power. All this with minimum effort. 

We can make synthetic materials things that will last forever! Industry didnât like this at all so they made it expensive! Truth is people... we are allowing them to put a price-tag on our lives... Our childrenâs lives.  :Banghead: 

We have been slaves for so long now we donât know what it is to be free... Why because everything is owned by someone. Government is a tool used by Industry... You think you are free! Quit your job and see how everyone will come and take everything you have away from you. The system is designed this way... So my fellow slaves work and urn a living but remember this: life is a gift as is freedom. 

Green power is no longer a dream; Technology is no longer our enemy. But until we free ourselves from financial law... these technologies will become just another echo, another slideshow to show our children...  :Frown:

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## Dave A

Here's an interesting story on green power.



> Green lobbyists fear that draft regulations on electricity generation, released by government in January, may undermine investment into renewable energy. 
> 
> The regulations promote competitive pricing and appear to conflict with an initiative by Nersa, the energy regulator, to set up preferential tariffs to promote new, clean energy technologies.
> 
> The Department of Minerals and Energy draft regulations are intended to facilitate independent power producers. But environmentalists and energy analysts say the department will scare away investors.
> full story from M&G here


It seems to be the usual problem, the structure of the regulation lends itself to unintended consequences.



> Richard Worthington, WWF's climate change programme manager, appealed to the department to withdraw the regulations because they were not compatible with the government's commitment, as outlined by Sonjica.
> 
> "Competitive bidding to initiate renewable energy development and deployment has a terrible international track record, while feed-in tariffs has a strong one," he said.


Of course, not everyone believes the consequences will be unintended.



> The national regulator will have to oversee both the new regulations as well as feed-in tariffs, which Rabinowitz believes will be a huge challenge for the regulator. 
> 
> The history of the energy tendering process worldwide has shown it to be unreliable in ensuring quality and cost, while feed-in tariffs are objective and place the onus on the renewable energy producer to roll out a successful technology. "One cannot help wondering who is waiting to profit from contracts, with no concern for the impact on the public, the country, job creation in South Africa or the state of the globe, but with lots of interest in personal pockets preparing to bulge," she said.

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## Dave A

An interesting story on Desertec here. Pretty bold stuff!

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## Frankincense

"The project aims to reduce fossilfuel dependency drastically in the Eumena (Europe, Middle East and North Africa) region by 2050. It was conceived by the Trans- Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, a t*hink-tank of scientists and engineers, then strengthened by the establishment of the Desertec Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Berlin. "*

These Guys are so dead!  :Shoot: 

Shell, British Petroleum and Opec team are probably gathering their G6's around the desert edge ready to take out these "absolute fools" for thinking they can "change the world"...and "green" the energy industry....lol

"If the solution is as clear as Desertec proponents make it out to be, then why are so many experts still keeping their distance? "

Ya hey, G6 projectiles can give one a nasty headache....

 :Stupid:

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## Dave A

When the time is right, Shell, British Petroleum and Opec team will probably buy shares...

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## tec0

I will go off-topic as usual, and say the following âis green energy our friendsâ I honestly donât think so. See when we had nuclear power a lot of wealthy industries benefited when this energy source was considered taboo.  

Right now, the world is changing to a point where âgreen energyâ and âwaste managementâ controls our output when it comes to manufacturing. Renewable energy is possible and basically easy to do âunlike popular published beliefâ Fact is, it is not being done, just look at Eskom! Show me 1 and just 1 new innovation that were developed by Eskom in the last ten years. There are zero new developments. 

Overall how has âgreen energyâ helped humanity to date? Electric cars are useless and expensive and the batteries are generating âmoreâ poisons than ever. And big expensive corporations are building small âwater purifying unitsâ for homes that can âafford itâ but not a damn thing is done to build a mega water purifying plant that can purify sea water for home and farming. âWhat is up with that?â  :Confused: 

Fact is; talk is cheap. The truth about âthinking greenâ is it gave government the right to fine industries and thus generate more money. In short âthinking greenâ is about controlling industry and taking money. All this talk is purely fictional because in reality we are still generating power by burning dead dinosaurs.   :Banghead:

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## Frankincense

Global Warming - Nonsense!

http://globalwarming-nonsense.com/

What is global warming? Put simply, it is the belief that humans have caused the average temperatures on earth to increase by the adding of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by the burning of carbon-based fuels like petroleum, wood and coal.


The true facts, however, do not support the idea of man-made global warming! Natural processes totally dispel anything that man can accomplish - a small rainstorm produces more energy than a large nuclear explosive releases and the lowest category of hurricane produces more energy than all of the nuclear weapons ever created by man.


*The eruption of Mount St Helens put more pollutants into the atmosphere than the entire history of man kind*. Think about it. Most geologists and now, most scientists around the world, do not accept the idea that global warming resulting from human activities is a viable theory - because most have an appreciation for the kind of power inherent in natural systems created by mother earth.


Conversely, most biologists do accept the idea of human created global warming and quote scientists in other fields, without ever understanding those fields sufficiently enough to make a logical assessment as to whether the studies were reasonable or even logical in their methods and claims. They simply take it on faith that the scientists touting global warming are correct in their methods and assumptions.



Geologists point to a period of much warmer weather prior to the minor Ice Age of 1350-1850 A.D., in which it was possible to farm in most of Scandinavia, Canada and even in Greenland (and why was it called Greenland? Duhh!). It is now too cold to farm in Greenland, northern Canada and all but the southern tip of Scandinavia. Historians speak of times in the past when the planet was much warmer than now, such as prior to the fifth century A.D. or the 11th century B.C., when northern Europe was similar to the Mediterranean in overall climatic conditions.


There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is some how an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around. In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years.


Our climate is changing, just as it has always done, and always will. In fact, the only constant about our climate is that it changes, which makes you realize the term "climate change" is at best meaningless, and at worst intentionally ambiguous. It feels silly that I need to say this, but clearly it has to be done. The main determinant of our climate is not some gas, which comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere, but the Sun, the planet's orbital eccentricities and axial wobble, cosmic ray flux, and other celestial factors. Greenhouse gases play an important role, but a passive one. It should not come as a surprise that our entire solar system has been warming for the last quarter century, or that the most accurate weather forecasts come from algorithms that concentrate on solar fluctuations and cosmic rays.


Scientists worldwide have now jumped on the global warming bandwagon. It’s become a fad, a trend, a wave of enthusiasm and the scientists are going along with the fad to simply get lucrative research grants and the media spotlight. The various activist groups are going along with it because it supports their socialist agenda of wiping out industry and personal freedoms. Global warming has even hit the big screen with “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide. For Al Gore the movie has been a $100 million earnings windfall, international recognition and has stirred a global debate which will rage on for the next few decades.


Let's talk about Earth's historical and current temperatures. Global warming alarmists would have us believe that we are now seeing a global temperature at a height not achieved for a very long time. This is simply not factual. We have seen temperatures even within the last 1,000 years higher than our present, which is not even a blip in Earth’s history.



Possibly the most infamous display of this nonsense is the "hockey-stick graph":


Although Mann et al compiled it in 1998, it was not until 2003 that the first independent person was able to look at the algorithms used in the graph, because they refused to release it. It turned out that, even using completely randomized data, one could create a graph that looked exactly the same because the algorithms had a bias to exaggerate the last century! Not only that, but it should be obvious from the fact that the Vikings were settling and farming Greenland from the 9th to the 13th century, in places now covered with permafrost and ice, that this graph is just total nonsense! Of course, this was not before the graph had been used as the backdrop for the 2001 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You would have thought that was a pretty good indication of their scientific integrity, but I promise you it gets much, much worse. Perhaps even more interesting than the inability of the IPCC to verify its data before using it at all, let alone as a centerpiece, or subsequently apologizing after it became public how fraudulent the graph was, is the fact that environmentalists to this day still use this graph to illustrate their points. Al Gore's entire sensationalist "documentary" (boy is that charitable) revolves around this widely discredited graph and others like it. It should honestly occur to us that anyone who continues to use this graph to support their arguments has little interest in actually presenting reality. The IPCC used to publish the real temperature data on the past millennium in its earlier reports, but not anymore because it’s an inconvenient truth to their agenda.




What about recent temperature rises in the last century? Surely it is impossible to deny that we are seeing warming now at an unusual and alarming rate? Well, you'd be surprised. Measuring Earth's average temperature to any interesting degree of precision is a considerably complex task. Even defining exactly what the absolute surface air temperature means is challenging, giving plenty of room for pursuing an agenda. The vast majority of graphs you've seen on this subject will have come from data using land-based measurements, as these allow the graph to continue back beyond the 1970s. There are numerous problems with land-based measurements, ranging from the fact that land only accounts for 30% of the planet's surface, to urban heat islands and other effects from changes in local land use. Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. says, [7] "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (the 2D representation of a sphere which exaggerates the polar area) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance." However, in the last 30 years we've had consistent measurements from weather balloons and satellites, which produce much more reliable results for obvious reasons, and what we've observed from this equipment is a only a very slight warming trend. This data should be puzzling to the people who built the climate models for the IPCC, because they actually predicted the reverse - the troposphere should be warming faster than the surface if the current warming is due to the 'greenhouse effect'.




While we're on the subject of climate models, I'd like to say a few things. Climate models are in their infancy. They are highly dependent on the assumptions that go into them, and there are a lot of them. In fact, there are so many assumptions and parameters that it is genuinely possible to create any relationship you like. Climate models are made fun by the inclusion of "positive feed-backs" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response to CO2. It seems to have become somewhat of a game to see who can add in the most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios from their models, but there remains no evidence that the planet behaves in such a manner. Not only is it highly debatable as to whether water vapour acts as a positive or negative feed-back, but what has been observed in laboratories is that CO2 actually has a logarithmic relationship with temperature. The IPCC literally made its entire conclusion from the results of 6 models. Three of these were extreme scenarios with numbers like a global population of 15 billion by 2100 (almost all demographers expect our population to level at 9 billion), and even the 3 that were ‘moderate’ were predicting things like the annual rainfall in Ireland should be equivalent to the Sahara’s. Today. The unreliable nature of these models probably helps to explain why the IPCC cut almost of all its predictions by a third from 2001 to its most recent report. They also failed to predict the fall in methane levels we've seen since 2002, and their predictions for sea temperatures have been halved due to "incorrectly calibrated instrumentation". As the saying in computer programming goes; "Garbage in, garbage out".




There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is some how an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around. In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia had the following to say about this; [8] "Al Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak, that they are pathetic. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." The historical evidence consistently shows temperature is independent of CO2. In fact, 450 million years ago when we were in the depths of the coldest period the Earth has had in half a billion years, CO2 levels were 10 times above today's! Even using the last century as evidence for a dependent relationship is meaningless. 65% of the warming this century occurred in the first three decades, and then, while CO2 levels continued to rise, temperatures fell for four decades in a row.




Another misconception that seems to be rife at the moment is that some how CO2 is a pollutant. I'm sure that you've all learned that this gas is actually fundamental to our existence, but this seems to be as good a time as any to re-cap. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population. Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. What should be obvious is that increases in CO2 directly increase the vitality of the bio-world. It is no wonder that the Sahara has shrunk 300,000 km^2 in the last couple decades, or that the dinosaurs managed to find the sustenance to survive, despite their size, in an era with 5 times our current CO2 levels.




The last myth I'd like to debunk is the idea that global warming is necessarily a bad thing, regardless of whether we have any significant control over it, or that historically warm periods have been the most prosperous for humans. By far the most hyped consequences are increasing intensities of weather storms, and rising sea levels. Global storm intensities are dominated by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and it really is that simple. Even by the IPCC's own admission, in manipulating the area of the poles using the Mercator system to distort the global temperature, the poles must be warming at a rate faster than the equator and this subsequently leads to gentler storms, despite the media explicitly or implicitly making an attempt to blame every last weather anomaly on "climate change". Ah yes, you say, but that would imply that we are in danger of rising sea levels because the warming would melt the ice at the poles. Well, consider this. Since the last ice age 18,000 years ago the global sea level has risen by 130 meters, and is still doing so at a current rate of around 20cm per century, which is dwarfed by local tectonic movements. This will obviously displace people, but it will pale in insignificance when compared to the migrations over the next century caused by other factors such as geographical changes in important resources, fresh water locations, industrialization, etc. Dramatic pictures of breaking seasonal ice is just patent propaganda, the reality is that Antarctica’s ice mass has now been growing for the last 30 years against a 6,000 year trend of melting, and it contains over 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, by Archimedes’s principle, does not affect sea levels). Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, [9] "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."


Vostok Ice Core Interpretation


One of the main planks in the global warming theory is the extraordinary Vostok ice core, dragged 2.5 km out of the Antarctic ice by the Russians in the '80s and '90s. (Other ice cores and analysis methods tell much the same story, but we will concentrate here on Vostok) The data from the ice, published in 1999 gives snapshots of temperature and CO2 concentrations going back 400,000 years. Since the two data sets have different time scales, it is a little tricky to graph them together.

http://www.noe21.org/dvd2/Global%20W...emperature.htm

But, here they are:

http://alsystems.algroup.co.uk/warming/CO2_temp.gif

An Excel spreadsheet and graph of the data can be downloaded from here.

Natural global warming seems to be expected about now in the cycle, but I'm sceptical/skeptical about man-made warming.

*Politics

If the science is hard to understand, the politics is easy. The 'man-made CO2 calamity' gives the developed nations a wonderful stick with which to beat the emerging superpowers of India and China. If the west can persuade them that they have a moral duty to clean up their industries, substantial extra costs are imposed on them which will do something to offset the west's higher wages.*

On the campaign level in the west, things work as usual in practical politics. Here is one of several accounts by scientists who *changed their views* about global warming, from

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/...ming051607.htm 

"I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed. The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role," he added. "Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics."


...and dont forget about all the intorduced taxes & rebates for compliance etc.... :Stupid:

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Dave A (22-Oct-09)

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## Dave A

Just one comment - Even if we take CO2 emissions out of the energy discussion, the issue of sustainability remains.

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## wynn

Peak Oil probably holds a more imminent threat to us personally than global warming see http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=335844 

The result for us will probably wind up being beneficial health wise but economically disasterous?

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## Frankincense

@ Dave : "...,the issue of sustainability remains"

...WHO can sustain throughout an ICE AGE?...... :Stupid: 

Thank God for Himself!!!!

Humans have always messed alot of things up on the globe...but mother nature is quite steadfast..and will always make a path....Her and Her Father's path by design.....*such a happy smile*   :Slayer: 

...many called, few chosen....indeed, sustainability reaches far beyond physical asset/earth management....
 :Thumbup:

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