Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

The troubling tension between propelling prosperity and limiting climate risks in a world still wedded to fossil fuels is on full display this week. India’s Tata Power group just gained important financial backing from the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank, for its planned $4 billion, 4-billion watt “Ultra Mega” coal-burning power plant complex in Gujarat state.

The I.F.C., along with the Asian Development Bank, Korea, and other backers, sees the need to bring electricity to one of the world’s poorest regions as more pressing than limiting carbon dioxide from fuel burning. The plants will emit about 23 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the I.F.C., but using technology that is 40 percent more efficient at turning coal into kilowatt-hours than the average for India.

The decision powerfully illustrates one of the most inconvenient facets of the world’s intertwined climate and energy challenges — that more than two billion people still lack any viable energy choices, let alone green ones.

India and China continue to build coal fired power stations to provide energy for parts of their populations that still have no viable energy choices. This will push more C02 into the atmosphere and move the planet into more dangerous climate change. It is a dilemma that we need to really focus on. While coal remains the cheapest form of energy we will be putting the planet at risk. We need to put more money into research for alternative energy as well as putting a moratorium on our export of coal. We need to make coal more expensive so that it is not the cheapest form of energy.

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, has predicted that coal-fired power plants will be banned in the United States because of climate change concerns and the financial liabilities of greenhouse gas emissions.

Brown has said that one year ago, there were 151 proposed or planned US coal-fired power plants. About two-thirds of those proposals have been challenged legally or canceled.

"This is an extraordinary turnaround here in the space of one year. The overriding reason for this shift has been mounting concern about climate change," Lester said.

The other reason, he points out, is soaring construction costs (which have gone up 76 percent in the last three years).

Richard:  This humble moderator, sweating in the middle of what looks like being a ten-day autumnal heat wave, is uncertain about your climate change denial.

I sympathize with your predicament Richard, I really do. In a heat wave lots of liquids are apparently advised.

Having a get together this week; thinking about calling it: Bring the snow shovel or a kilo of coke.

A heart warming story doing the internet rounds http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2100369.0.Crime_fighters_fears_of_new_drugs_influx.php

Ana Maria Caballero, adviser to the vice-president of Columbia, attended the conference to encourage those who take the drug to consider the impact on global warming.

"We have lost two million hectares of tropical rainforest as a result of the slash-and-burn techniques used by the drug growers," she said.

I would have thought that selling one's entire earthly possessions, and children into prostitution, would be something that would appeal to enviro-socialists - apparently not it would seem. I suppose all those bullet proof hummers do leave a carbon footprint. Next guy caught with a dime bag could always claim it is only being used to deal with the cooler than normal weather.

Richard:  This humble moderator, sweating in the middle of what looks like being a ten-day autumnal heat wave, is uncertain about your climate change denial.  You're right, though, Paul, in the likely success of such an argument

The head of the UN World Food Programme has warned that the rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010.

Josette Sheeran blamed soaring energy and grain prices, the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels.

Miss Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.

Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world's poorest will buy less food, less nutritious food or be forced to rely on aid.

Among the contributing factors to high food prices is biofuel production.

Miss Sheeran says demand for crops to produce biofuels is increasing prices for food stuffs such as palm oil.

Miss Sheeran said governments needed "to look more carefully at the link between the acceleration in biofuels and food supply and give more thought to it".

The WFP says countries where price rises are expected to have a most direct impact include Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Haiti, Djibouti, the Gambia, Tajikistan, Togo, Chad, Benin, Burma, Cameroon, Niger, Senegal, Yemen and Cuba.

Areas where the WFP is already seeing an impact include:

 

Afghanistan: 2.5 million people in Afghanistan cannot afford the price of wheat, which rose more than 60% in 2007

 

Bangladesh: The price of rice has risen 25% to 30% over the last three months. In 2007, the price rose about 70%.

 

El Salvador: Rural communities are buying 50% less food than they did 18 months ago with the same amount of money. This means their nutritional intake, on an already poor diet, is cut by half.

 

Anger over rising food prices have already led to riots in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Senegal and Morocco.

As aid agencies struggle to feed millions of people we moan because of the extra dollar or two it takes to fill our gas guzzlers. As the price of energy continues to rise and we move to biofuels more and more will starve unless we change our attitudes.

The Age of Oil is at an end. Maybe not this year. Maybe not for five years. But signs of the coming collapse are evident.

Start at the White House. There, a week ago, President Bush touted tax breaks for oil companies that have just posted the largest profits in the history of American business. Yet he was dumbstruck when asked about the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a price that will force many families to choose between food and basic travel.

“Wait — what did you just say?”, the president asked after a reporter solicited his advice for Americans facing that price, which was predicted by many analysts.

“Oh, yeah?” Bush said. “That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.”

He doesn’t get out much, understandably. But had the president been in California over the weekend, he would have found consumers paying what he apparently has yet to fathom — more than $4 a gallon at some stations.

Bush is out of touch with the American people, who are struggling to pay $4 a gallon for fuel. Meanwhile Australians are paying about $7 a gallon.  The end of the oil age is something politicians the world over just do not want to face. What price will oil have to reach before we decide to take any real action?

John, "If you are planing a trip overseas looks like you had better make it in the next few years."

And take your own water. 

The three water crises – dwindling freshwater supplies, inequitable access to water and the corporate control of water – pose the greatest threat of our time to the planet and to our survival. Together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, the water crises impose some life-or-death decisions on us all. Unless we collectively change our behavior, we are heading toward a world of deepening conflict and potential wars over the dwindling supplies of freshwater – between nations, between rich and poor, between the public and the private interest, between rural and urban populations, and between the competing needs of the natural world and industrialized humans.

Around the world, more that 215 major rivers and 300 groundwater basins and aquifers are shared by two or more countries, creating tensions over ownership and use of the precious waters they contain. Growing shortages and unequal distribution of water are causing disagreements, sometimes violent, and becoming a security risk in many regions. Britain’s former defense secretary, John Reid, warns of coming “water wars.” In a public statement on the eve of a 2006 summit on climate change, Reid predicted that violence and political conflict would become more likely as watersheds turn to deserts, glaciers melt and water supplies are poisoned. He went so far as to say that the global water crisis was becoming a global security issue and that Britain’s armed forces should be prepared to tackle conflicts, including warfare, over dwindling water sources. “Such changes make the emergence of violent conflict more, rather than less, likely,” former British prime minister Tony Blair told The Independent. “The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign.”

Now if we could spare, say, $3 trillion, better yet, $6 trillion, and address the water crisis ... Oh!

In an interview with Global Public Media, Sir Richard Branson told journalist David Strahan that aviation could be made “truly sustainable” at the launch of test flight fuelled in part by coconut oil. But the Virgin boss conceded that meaningful supplies of alternative fuel might not be available before the advent of peak oil, which he said could happen within six years.

Sir Richard later told GlobalPublicMedia.com that algae might provide enough fuel for the entire global aviation industry, and that such technological breakthroughs represented the only chance of avoiding peak oil – which otherwise might come within six years. Asked if jatropha or algae could be ready in so short a time he conceded this was a good question, and concluded that “we have to try our best to make them available as fast as we possibly can”.

Aviation currently consumes 5 million barrels of jetfuel per day, or 238 million tonnes per year. Even with relatively generous assumptions about yield – say 2 tonnes of jatropha oil per hectare – replacing that would take almost 1.2 million square kilometres. To put this in context, D1 Oils, the British company pioneering biofuel from jatropha, plans to plant 10,000 square kilometres over the next four years.

If you are planing a trip overseas looks like you had better make it in the next few years. This is another example of how our lives are going to change over the next ten years or so. We need to be planning for the loss of income when the tourist industry comes to an end.

Prices of rare metals like cobalt and magnesium are surging ahead in London, driven by high-end technology and soaring demand from economic powerhouse China, according to commodities experts.

Glamorous raw materials such as precious metal gold and oil have long hogged the headlines -- with New York crude at a record high 101.32 US dollars per barrel last week on concerns about tight global energy supplies.

But analysts say the lesser-known strategic metals, which also include cadmium, mercury and molybdenum, are now making headway. Other rare metals are antimony, ferrochrome, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese and tantalum.

"China would be the main market driver for 75 percent" of the 30 most traded rare metals, said Martin Hayes, a senior analyst for specialist website MinorMetals.com.

"The price gains reflect a combination of supply worries and demand influences."

This piece in The Age is another warning that economies that demand continuous growth are about to run out of steam. Whether we like it or not we will have to move to  more sustainable economies. We will have to get better at recycling and reduce waste whether possible. We are well along the road to peak everything. There are limits to growth and economists should be working on sustainable economies rather than growth economies. Maybe a recession is a good thing.

Most people know that the $100 peak on January 3rd was an artifact - the price having gone above $98, one trader wanted to be the guy who first traded oil at $100 and made a trade that he promptly resold at a loss. Somehow, being "the guy who traded at a price in 1980 that arguably was more than $100 allowing for inflation depending on how you calculate it ** " doesn't have quite the same cachet.

Well, this time it's staying there. 194,000 trades on Nymex yesterday, and settled 73¢ up, at $100.74. "I still think we're heading to 120 bucks, but it's still overbought," said Mark Waggoner, president of Excel Futures.

** CNN Money "Still, prices are still within the range of inflation-adjusted highs set in early 1980. Depending on how the adjustment is calculated, $38 a barrel then would be worth $96 to $103 or more today."

NYMEX settlement price

Also, belatedly to note that Alan Kohler picked up on peak platinum on Monday's seven-o-clock news.

The link I provided in my last post is not as good as this one, which in turn comes from a Science Daily report referenced by John Pratt.

As I see it, Peak Coal and Peak Oil will if anything stimulate most national economies. Enormous sums presently sent to the OPEC countries can largely remain at home. The Furafuel process promises to make Australia at least self-sufficient in crude oil, and if promise comes to deliverance will form the basis of an export industry. For example, Old Man Saltbush, which has recently come back into vogue as a plantation feed for livestock, has a long plant life (estimated at 100 years per plant) and conceivably could provide through annual or biennial pruning a continuous and drought-proof source of feedstock for the biocrude industry; and that is just one species.  Those hardy and prolific plants such as Paterson's Curse, Galvanised Burr and Bathurst Burr which are now classed as weeds can at last appear on the asset side of the farm balance sheet, being likewise potential feedstock for a locally-based biocrude industry, along with crop trash and grasses.

One simple fact reflects the enormity of the period of economic change we are now entering:  a great part of the energy, and pretty well all of the material now coming out of the coal and oil industries in future will have to come from the green plants. The list of materials (as distinct from fuels) includes plastics, paints, synthetic fibres, industrial and agricultural organic chemicals, and rubber. But the biggest of all by far is road tar.

A highway engineer once told me that studies of abandoned roads he had been involved with showed that it only took around three years for plants to start colonising a macadamised surface. This is but one reason why road repair and resurfacing is a constant operation, like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Concrete roads are hideously more expensive per kilometre than conventional tarred aggregate. So what happens to all the roads after Peak Coal? Tar sands would appear to be made to order here, as road building does not require combustion of the tar. But after them, the plants will have to fill that bill too.

George Monbiot in today's Guardian: Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel

  the [European] commission's methodology [in recommending a min 10% biofuel] has just been blown apart by two new papers. Published in Science magazine, they calculate the total carbon costs of biofuel production. When land clearance (caused either directly or by the displacement of food crops) is taken into account, all the major biofuels cause a massive increase in emissions.

Even the most productive source - sugar cane grown in the scrubby savannahs of central Brazil - creates a carbon debt which takes 17 years to repay. As the major carbon reductions must be made now, the net effect of this crop is to exacerbate climate change. The worst source - palm oil displacing tropical rainforest growing in peat - invokes a carbon debt of some 840 years. Even when you produce ethanol from maize grown on "rested" arable land (which in the EU is called set-aside and in the United States is called conservation reserve), it takes 48 years to repay the carbon debt. The facts have changed. Will the policy follow?

Many people believe there's a way of avoiding these problems: by making biofuels not from the crops themselves but from crop wastes - if transport fuel can be manufactured from straw or grass or wood chips, there are no implications for land use, and no danger of spreading hunger. Until recently I believed this myself.

Unfortunately most agricultural "waste" is nothing of the kind. It is the organic material that maintains the soil's structure, nutrients and store of carbon. A paper commissioned by the US government proposes that, to help meet its biofuel targets, 75% of annual crop residues should be harvested. According to a letter published in Science last year, removing crop residues can increase the rate of soil erosion a hundredfold. Our addiction to the car, in other words, could lead to peak soil as well as peak oil.

Removing crop wastes means replacing the nutrients they contain with fertiliser, which causes further greenhouse gas emissions. A recent paper by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that emissions of nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful than CO2) from nitrogen fertilisers wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce, even before you take the changes in land use into account.

Growing special second-generation crops, such as trees or switchgrass, doesn't solve the problem either: like other energy crops, they displace both food production and carbon emissions. Growing switchgrass, one of the new papers in Science shows, creates a carbon debt of 52 years. Some people propose making second-generation fuels from grass harvested in natural meadows or from municipal waste, but it's hard enough to produce them from single feedstocks; far harder to manufacture them from a mixture. Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel.

All these convoluted solutions are designed to avoid a simpler one: reducing the consumption of transport fuel. But that requires the use of a different commodity. Global supplies of political courage appear, unfortunately, to have peaked some time ago.

New Scientist editorial, 9 Feb 2008:

IF WE are going to carry on burning coal - our cheapest, most available, most abundant and most polluting fossil fuel - we urgently need to capture carbon emissions from coal-fired plants and bury them out of harm's way. So it is deeply worrying that the US, which has more coal than any other nation, last week cancelled its most ambitious plan to bring this technology to market.

Just before Christmas, Mattoon in Illinois was selected as the site for the first large-scale demonstration project for carbon capture and storage (CCS). Now US energy secretary Samuel Bodman has pulled the plug (see "US government pulls the plug on flagship clean coal project"), a decision that looks likely to set back the development of CCS technology by three to five years. This is startling and dangerous. It suggests that the Bush administration's repeated promises to fast-track clean-coal technology were so much hot air.

Equally worryingly, the decision seems to be part of a pattern. It is only nine months since BP pulled out of a plan to build a CCS power plant in Scotland whose carbon would have been buried under the North Sea in an old oilfield. It cited a lack of British government enthusiasm for underwriting the project as a reason to withdraw. The European Union has so far put very little flesh on its plan to have 12 demonstration plants for CCS up and running by 2015. Only Australia and China seem to be going to town on the technology.

In fact, most of it already exists - including new combustion systems, the capture technology itself and underground burial of liquefied gases. What is needed is to scale it up and put it together in large demonstration projects. But these are costly, in the realms of a billion dollars, and neither industry nor government wants to bite the bullet.

The US administration baulked at paying its $1.3 billion share of the Mattoon project. The European Commission announced two weeks ago that there was "no possibility of significant funding from the EU budget" for CCS. Meanwhile, the power and coal industries are unwilling to bet large sums on a technology that only makes sense when either coal-fired power plants without CCS are banned, or the financial penalty for emitting carbon rises to match the cost of keeping it out of the air.

There has been a lot of talk in the past two or three years that the world can carry on burning coal because CCS is just round the corner, ready to be bolted onto coal-fired power stations from China to California. Cynics say this was always a smokescreen put up by a beleaguered industry and its political backers. If the proponents of coal really do think that CCS is the future, now's the time to show that the cynics are wrong.

Ian MacDougall, here's my rejoinder;

The boy stood on the freezing deck,
raving like a loon!
"If we don't all jump overboard", he said,
"We'll all be drowning soon."

"Put the ship hard to Left,
don't worry about the facts!"
"Opinions is what matters here!"
"Let's panic to the max."

"I've got the feelin' fate's at hand,
so hysteria is a boon!"
"We've no more hope of surviving this", he said,
"than the Yanks have flyin' to the moon."

"Get your knickers in a knot,
"and stir a panic up in steerage!"
"Let's make 'em frightened quite a lot,
burghers, plebs and peerage."

Craig Rowley: "Eliot, what Richard asked you to explain is how you could have been waiting for "over two years" to make particular a comment on Webdiary when you've been registered to comment as "Eliot Ramsey" for only 34 weeks.  So, what is your explanation?"

Craig, what I actually said was this:

"That's okay. I've been waiting for over two years for someone to bring up the 'Human-shredding-machine hysteria.'"

If you go to the link I provided, you'll see the news item is dated December 6, 2005. That is, just over two years ago.

That's when I clipped it.

I was Eliot Ramsey then. And I'm Eliot Ramsey now. 

I appreciate the subtle philosophical debate about whether a discontinuity of consciousness entails a discontinuity of personal being, and making allowance for occasional bouts of poor concentration, sleep and occasional alcohol induced unconsciouness, I've been me the whole time.

Roger Fedyk: "Eliot, I don't see the auto industry as doing anything more than hedging bets. The predominant automobile power plant for the forseeable future is the fossil fuel engine. Lots of talk about new technology but mainly "business as usual"."

I've been "waiting for over two years" to use the Iraqi torture victim's personal account of the disputed shredding machine because that's how long ago I first saw it in the Herald. I knew someone, somewhere would eventually dispute the machine's existence. I tuck things like that away for future reference. Endearing, no?

Jacob was merely the first person in two years to walk into the cross-hairs. Sorry, Jacob.

I have an absolute beauty ticking away concerning comparative per capita rates of capital punishment between countries that would defy belief were it not for the scrupulous research by the study's author.

I cannot wait to pull that one.

Well, at least the drought has peaked here on the plains. It just won't stop raining now we want it to for a week or two so we can spray the pest weeds.

The digit grass we planted ten years ago is above my head - a wonderful sight. But it won't last. We are already headed for the next big one. But why worry.

Saw a report last night the Chinese are building a new city the size of Brisbane every month. Doesn't bode well for reducing greenhouse gases, or taking the pressure of resources of all kinds. The mind boggles as to what the demand in China would have been today without its one child policy.

Yet here we are talking about a need to increase the birthrate in the West. It will be the expected population peak/explosion to 9 billion that will cause everything else to peak.

Either we stem population growth, or we just blunder on to the inevitable conclusion. You don't have to be an expert in anything to see that. The lesson of Easter Island should not be ignored. But it will be. That is as certain as the next drought.

Jacob A. Stam: "With apologies for going somewhat off-topic, but Paul's and Eliot's warnings regarding mass hysteria are quite apposite."

That's okay. I've been waiting for over two years for someone to bring up the 'Human-shredding-machine hysteria.'

And now the moment has arrived...

This witness statement from Mr Ahmed Hassan Mohammed, 38, appearing for the prosecution at Saddam Hussein's trial:

"I swear by God, I walked by a room and ... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," Hassan told the court.

During the testimony, Barzan, sitting behind Saddam in the dock, interrupted Hassan, shouting: "It's a lie!"

Hassan said: "My brother was given electric shocks while my 77-year-old father watched ... One man was shot in the leg ... Some were crippled because they had arms and legs broken."

And associated sub-hysterias: The 45-minutes-to-deploy-Saddam's-WMD hysteria. Human-shredding-machine hysteria. Nigerian-yellowcake hysteria. Anthrax-innoculations-for-our-soldiers hysteria. Babies-thrown-out-of-humidicribs hysteria.

All converging into a critical hysterical mass, oddly these mass hysterias weren't propagated by non-governmental actors who stood to benefit from fostering undue public concern.

Eliot Ramsey and Paul Morrella have been running a line about "hysteria".

I try to point out that their hysteria about this imagined hysteria is hillariously ironic. 

My comments to that effect don't get published.

Why is that?

Richard:  Paul and Eliot also have had parts of their work edited.  I made my decisions last night based on the downwards slide of the tone of the conversation, and have been involved in decisions made today.  As you know, Craig, sometimes it's not a matter of specific language but also of semantics.  Let's move on, shall we?

I wonder if anyone has taken the time to think about a scenario which I have been thinking could occur and we would have no hope of stopping its results. Please don't pick on my clear ignorance of the science involved. I do believe our atmosphere contains just 14%, or there about, oxygen in its content.

Considering we are depleting rapidly the eco systems which generates oxygen by consuming Co2 and humans are consuming oxygen at an increasing rate, from population growth, heavy industry and transport. Is it not probable that our atmosphere may reach a stage where the oxygen content is diminished to where animal life will struggle to breathe.

This scenario could be repeated within our oceans as they become more and more acid and stop producing oxygen, suffocating sea life and humans.

Maybe we will peak breathable air, before long. Considering we are entering uncharted waters, anything is possible, isn't it?

Craig Rowley

If not an exact date, can you give us at least a rough date for when you reckon that'll "eventually" happen, Paul?

Nothing exists like a US election for pure hysteria. So expect the hilarity hysteria to commence very shortly. Culminating in the ceremonial environmental blessing by Saint Al of a lass named Hilary or guy named Barack. Thus depending on ultimate outcome hysteria will either ramp up or become positive news. Most probably though a major economic downturn will kill this fad as dead as a dodo. Generally during such times people begin concentrating on issues that severely affect them like having a job. Paying pointless over inflated job destroying costs just doesn't seem to give the same bang for the buck during such times.

The federal government is facing a dilemma over its funding of the world's leading clean coal experiment after the US ended its commitment.

The Bush administration blamed budget blow-outs for its decision to stop funding the $US1.8-billion ($2 billion) FutureGen project, Fairfax reports.

The US decision is a blow to the Australian coal industry's hopes that a commercially viable clean coal plant would be built in the foreseeable future.

Greens senator Christine Milne called on the Rudd government to pull taxpayers' money out of FutureGen and other projects, saying the Howard government's clean coal strategy had collapsed.

"All the government money in the project from the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund has all come to nothing," she said. "Government funding for FutureGen and any other clean coal pipedreams should be withdrawn in favour of renewable technologies that are up and running now."

Senator Milne is right to urge the government to focus on technologies that have a better chance of success than wasting more money on the fantasy of clean coal. 

David Roffey

According to one trader, "supply is so tight at the moment that users just have to pay whatever producers are asking, and if they sit around and wait, they will either have to fork out even higher prices or be told there is no more tonnage available".

Personally I would be financially extremely wary of believing this price surge will continue indefinitly. The new buzzword has become economic decoupling. The wish (need) to believe this will eventuate may induce many to overlook some glaringly obvious realities. The only real certainty is that the world is looking at some very interesting times ahead.

CSIRO and Monash University have developed a chemical process that turns green waste into a stable bio-crude oil. The bio-crude oil can be used to produce high value chemicals and biofuels, including both petrol and diesel replacement fuels.

Another example of Australian technology that could be sold to the world.  

BBC report:

According to one trader, "supply is so tight at the moment that users just have to pay whatever producers are asking, and if they sit around and wait, they will either have to fork out even higher prices or be told there is no more tonnage available".

Roger Fedyk

I doubt whether we are witnessing a scientific plot with Da Vinci Code overtones. Science wonks are not that well organised or adept.

I also strongly doubt this is the case. Throughout history it has been proven hysteria isn't something that is driven by any one person or even one particular group - the term mass hysteria is used for that very reason.  Only in the "after hysteria" does it ever become clear who[m] gained most - sometimes not even then. In some instances it can be a number of interests often with one interest being in complete opposition to other. It may also be that the main drivers become the biggest after losers. It is rarely if ever possible to pin point the exact reason why mass hysteria begins or even why it just as quickly fades away.

An example of mass hysteria many may remember is the "AIDS epidemic" - reaching its mass hysteria crescendo during the mid eighties. From nut jobs blaming the CIA or KGB all the way through to bible bashing doomsayers, and kooks wanting to teach condom use, and safe injecting measures to three year olds this period of mass hysteria had it all. From the downright dangerous: All high risk people should be segregated from society and denied medical treatment through to the plain nasty: Rednecks turning up with their "offspring" in mock coffins to make the point about who should be allowed in the schools, through to the plain wacky: Is the handshake really now a thing of a bygone in era in this new reality? No doubt others could give a thousand examples of similar cases of pure stupidity.

Well for whatever reason the circus eventually left town, and people got on with their lives, and society got down to actually attempting to deal in a level headed way with what was, and still is a serious issue. Personally I can think of a few people in both politics and the media (still there only older) that would not like to be reminded about certain actions, and statements during this time (sheer embarrassment) - at least one of them is now in the process of running for President of the United States.

Who gained the most from this mass hysteria? The answer to that would most probably depend on who you ask.

Craig Rowley

Paul, why did you make out that it was something you were predicting, something that would "eventually happen", if it was something you're now claiming has already happened?

Just something I found on Google.

Like the more important question should be: does this concern you? I know winning an argument on here is all important, but...they wonder why people turn their back on politics!

Roger Fedyk said::"Eliot, Bob Carter certainly does not say that climate change is not happening."

I know Roger. I pointed that out. I actually stated:

"He says Al Gore doesn't "present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change."

The climate is changing. It just has not "departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change".

Which is, of course, totally different to what fear mongers and hysterics like Al Gore and others on the 'band wagon' say.

I realise that will be incredibly upsetting for a lot of folk who have their hearts set on seeing the sky falling down and squishing Chicken Little and all her friends.

But they'll be fine. There'll be another hysterical fad by then.

John Pratt says:

"Time to get on board the band wagon Eliot, you look increasingly isolated in you denial or reality."

John, they had "droughts and flooding rains" when Dorothea Mackellar wrote that poem - in 1911.

Professor Carter, at James Cook University, doesn't say climate change isn't happening.

He says Al Gore doesn't "present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change."

In other words, Professor Carter, too, isn't on the 'band wagon' - as you so aptly describe it.

Eliot Ramsey, taking a stab in the dark I would suggest the "dam reports" came about during a round of price rises (call me the suspicious type)? Why bother explaining the reasons for perhaps necessary price rises when the easier option exists, huh? And it of course can only make people more aware of the environment which ultimately can only achieve good irrespective of truth!?!?

That is of course until your ten year old comes home from school explaining why he/she will only see twenty at best; fruit loops begin speaking seriously about releasing Ebola into the water system etc.........The thing with hysteria is when it comes to an end; nobody ever really meant to actually get taken literally.

Perhaps the time is nigh for the real scientific community to take some control over this issue. You have at least provided a small example of a good start.