Tag Archives: Science / Environment

How much gold is there in the world?

Very cool descriptions of all the gold in the world here.

open quoteThe best estimate at the end of 2011 is that around 165,000 metric tons (or tonnes) have been mined in all of human history. That’s about 181,881 ordinary tones . . . or 5,820,203,717 ordinary ounces . . . .

3.42 Olympic-sized swimming pools could contain all the gold . . . Another way to imagine this is to think of all the gold in the world ever mined as a single cube. That would be a cube with each side just over 20 meters, or 67 feet in length. . . .

[The] annual production of gold would fit in a cube whose sides were 5 meters.close quote

U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon

open quoteolyndraGate was no isolated case of corrupt government misspending. The U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon.

The massive Obama stimulus was supposed to generate millions of jobs, but the $535 million loan guarantee it gave to solar panel maker Solyndra on the eve of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy illustrated the fundamental incompetence of Obama’s neo-Keynesian economic ideology.

Now we find the Navy partnering with the Agriculture Department to purchase hundreds of thousands of gallons of alternative biofuel in place of standard JP-5 fuel for Navy aircraft — the biggest federal purchase of biofuel ever.

It’s part of the White House’s “we can’t wait for Congress” strategy as the 2012 election year looms. But JP-5 typically costs less than $4 a gallon. . . .

A look at the lucky seller of this environmentalist version of the proverbial $600 Pentagon toilet seat indicates that the move is not just wasteful, but ethically suspect.

As J.E. Dyer noted over the weekend on the Hot Air Green Room, “a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a ‘strategic advisor’ at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy. Glauthier worked — shock, shock — on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.”close quote (Read more)

Climate Gate 2.0

Also: open quoteLast week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called “the gold standard” of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The new release of emails was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the original climategate leak and with the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa. And it has already stirred strong emotions. To Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), for example, the leaker or leakers responsible are attempting to “sabotage the international climate talks” and should be identified and brought “to justice.”

One might sympathize with Mr. Markey’s outrage if, say, the emails were maliciously rewritten or invented. But at least one scientist involved—Mr. Mann—has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago.close quote (Read more)

Easily the most interesting article about octopuses I’ve read this week:

open quoteI have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

. . . .

The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. “She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.

As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. Each arm has more than two hundred of them.

. . . .

Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.

When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth. This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus. An agitated giant Pacific octopus turns red, its skin gets pimply, and it erects two papillae over the eyes, which some divers say look like horns. One name for the species is “devil fish.” With sharp, parrotlike beaks, octopuses can bite, and most have neurotoxic, flesh-dissolving venom.

. . . .

Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena’s predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.

. . . .

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

“Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.” Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom—until it swims away.

close quote (Read more from Orion Magazine)

Massive “Green” corruption

open quoteTUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Energy Secretary Steven Chu should resign as a result of the disastrous decision to guarantee $537 million in loans to failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra.

The federal government’s rush to guarantee the loans despite numerous warning signs threatens to cost taxpayers more than $500 million. Career government employees repeatedly warned that this “investment” was flawed from the beginning. Not only was Solyndra betting on an unproven “thin film” technology, but it was trying to compete with a cost structure that was uneconomical even under optimistic assumptions.

Regardless of your position on the merits of government investments in green energy, you should insist on Chu’s resignation.
Click here to find out more!

As a skeptic, I’m horrified but not surprised at a massive loss of public money in a badly managed firm. But if you think green energy investments are a good idea in general, you should be furious over Solyndra.

Not only did the company hand out $37,000 to $60,000 bonuses to its managers as it spiraled into bankruptcy this summer. Solyndra built a brand-new facility in one of the highest cost locations in America rather than recycling an existing building in a cheaper location, ordered expensive robots that whistled Disney tunes rather than focusing its spending on production, and paid investors dividends even as the company ran short of cash.

As Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., noted, putting taxpayer money in such a firm was “felony dumb.”

Worse, there is little doubt that the decision to guarantee the loans was politicized. The email trail uncovered by congressional investigators demonstrates considerable political pressure from the White House to approve the guarantees, leading some to speculate it was due to the Solyndra connections of Obama donor George Kaiser and his George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser was a key fundraiser for Obama’s presidential campaign, hosting a 2007 fundraiser at his home that raised more than $250,000. Kaiser’s foundation (which had nearly $4 billion in assets in 2009) was a key investor in Solyndra.

. . . .

Again, Solyndra appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as we learn of more green energy firms with political connections that have received federal loan guarantees and other subsidies.

close quote (Read more)

Man catches 881-pound tuna, seized by feds

open quoteA Massachusetts fisherman pulled in an 881-pound tuna this week only to have the federal authorities take it away. It sounds like a libertarian twist on the classic novella by Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, but for Carlos Rafael, the saga is completely true.

Rafael and his crew were using nets to catch bottom-dwellers when they inadvertently snagged the giant tuna. However, federal fishery enforcement agents took control of the behemoth when the boat returned to port. The reason for the seizure was procedural: While Rafael had tuna permits, fishermen are by law only allowed to catch tuna with a rod and reel.

. . . .

In an interview with the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Rafael disputes the claims from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) enforcement division that the humungous tuna was trawled from the bottom of the Atlantic. “They didn’t catch that fish on the bottom,” he said. “They probably got it in the mid-water when they were setting out and it just got corralled in the net. That only happens once in a blue moon.”

And while Rafael is denied the mother of all fish stories, the federal impoundment of his catch also means he’s probably losing out on a giant payday. A 754-pound tuna recently sold for nearly $396,000. NOAA regulators do not share any of the proceeds from the fish’s eventual sale with a fisherman found in violation of federal rules.

“They said it had to be caught with rod and reel,” a frustrated Rafael said. “We didn’t try to hide anything. We did everything by the book. Nobody ever told me we couldn’t catch it with a net.”close quote (Read more)

Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control

The population control issue is as far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory as I usually go. Generally, I encounter it as a vague desire, usually by environmentalist (environ-fascists) to severely decrease the Earth’s population.

I saw a chart in a National Geographic magazine where “Environmental Impact” was calculated as population, multiplied by prosperity, multiplied by technological advancement. Terrifying! This is precisely a war on people and their well-being.

I prefer to believe these things are dreamed up by people who don’t think through the implications of their statements.

open quote
So exactly what is Agenda 21? The following is how the United Nations defines Agenda 21….

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.

When you start doing deep research into Agenda 21, you will find that describing it as a “comprehensive plan” is an understatement. Virtually all forms of human activity impact the environment. The rabid “environmentalists” behind the green agenda intend to take all human activity and put it into a box called “sustainable development”.

One of the key elements of “sustainable development” is population control. The United Nations (along with radical “environmental” leaders such as Al Gore) actually believes that there are far too many people on earth.

So what is the solution?

Sadly, they actually believe that we need to start reducing the population.

Just this week, Al Gore made the following statement regarding population control….

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.

You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important – you have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

Do you notice how whenever global leaders talk about “empowering” women these days it always ends up with them having less children?

This population control agenda is also reflected in official UN documents.

The following is language from a UN resolution that was adopted by the UN General Assembly that was designed to further the implementation of Agenda 21….

“….population growth rates have been declining globally, largely as a result of expanded basic education and health care. That trend is projected to lead to a stable world population in the middle of the twenty-first century… The current decline in population growth rates must be further promoted through national and international policies that promote economic development, social development, environmental protection, and poverty eradication, particularly the further expansion of basic education, with full and equal access for girls and women, and health care, including reproductive health care, including both family planning and sexual health, consistent with the report of the International Conference on Population and Development.”

. . . .

The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

. . . .

the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following shocking statement….

What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?

Apparently the poorest nations are the primary target for the population control freaks over at the UN.

This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”.

The following are three quotes that were pulled right out of that document….

1) “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time.”

2) “No human is genuinely “carbon neutral,” especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation. Therefore, everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution in some way.”

3) “Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns.”

If no human is “carbon neutral”, then what is the solution?

To those that are obsessed with Agenda 21 and “sustainable development”, the fact that you and I are alive and breathing air is a huge problem.

The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now.

In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled “The Earth Is Full”, Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement….

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century – when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all – and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

But Friedman is quite moderate compared to many of the “eco-prophets” that are running around out there today.

For example, James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, stated in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year that “democracy must be put on hold” if the fight against global warming is going to be successful and that only “a few people with authority” should be permitted to rule the planet until the crisis is solved.

A Finnish environmentalist named Pentti Linkola has gone even farther than that. Linkola is openly calling for climate change deniers to be “re-educated”, for an eco-fascist world government to be established, for humans to be forcibly sterilized and for the majority of humans to be killed. . . .

Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka is a very prominent advocate of radical human population control.

In an article entitled “What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know”, Pianka made the following shocking statements….

*First, and foremost, we must get out of denial and recognize that Earth simply cannot support many billions of people.

*This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage.

*I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us. . . .

The reality is that many of the wealthiest and most prominent people in the world are absolutely obsessed with the green agenda and with population control. Just consider the following quotes….

David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

Maurice Strong: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Michael Oppenheimer: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”

This radical agenda is even represented in the White House.

John P. Holdren, Barack Obama’s top science advisor, co-authored a textbook entitled “Ecoscience” back in 1977 in which he actually advocated mass sterilization, compulsory abortion, a one world government and a global police force to enforce population control.

On page 837 of Ecoscience, a claim is made that compulsory abortion would be perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution….

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

On pages 942 and 943, a call is made for the creation of a “planetary regime” that would control the global economy and enforce population control measures….

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime – sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

On page 917, the surrender of U.S. national sovereignty to an international organization is advocated….

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

As mentioned earlier, Holdren is the number one science advisor to Barack Obama.close quote (Read more)

Population “Control” by Murray Rothbard

open quoteMost people exhibit a healthy lack of interest in the United Nations and its endless round of activities and conferences, considering them as boring busywork to sustain increasing hordes of tax-exempt bureaucrats, consultants, and pundits.

All that is true. But there is danger in underestimating the malice of UN activities. For underlying all the tedious nonsense is a continuing and permanent drive for international government despotism to be exercised by faceless and arrogant bureaucrats accountable to no one. The Fabian collectivist drive for power by these people remains unrelenting.

The latest exhibit, of course, is the recent Conference on Population, to be followed next year by an equally ominously entitled “Conference on Women.” The television propaganda by the UN for this year’s conference anticipates next year’s as well, best encapsulated in one of the most idiotically true statements made by anyone in decades: “Raising the standard of living for women will raise the standard of living for everyone.” Substitute “men” for “women” in this sentence, and the absurd banality of this statement becomes evident.

. . . .

The solution, then, is the euphemistically named “population control,” which in essence is the use of government power to encourage, or compel, restrictions on the growth, or on the numbers, of people in existence. Logically, of course, the anti-hu-man-being fanatics (for what is “the population” but an array of humans?) should advocate the murder by government planners of large numbers of existing people, especially in the allegedly overpopulated developing world (or, to use older term, Third World) countries. But something seems to hold them back; perhaps the charge of “racism” that might ensue. Their concentra tion, then, is on restricting the number of future births.

. . . the peak of ZPG [Zero Population Growth] hysteria in the U.S. came in the early 1970s, only to be put to rout when the census of 1970 was published, demonstrating that the ZPGers had actually achieved their goal and that the rate of population growth was already turning downward.

Interestingly enough, it took only a moment for the same people to complain that lower rates of population growth mean an aging population, and who or what is going to support the increasing number of the aged? It was at that point that the joys of early and “dignified” death for the elderly began to make its appearance in the doctrines of left-liberalism.

The standard call of the ZPGers was for a compulsory limit of two babies per woman, after which there would be government-forced sterilization or abortion for the offending female. (The Chinese communists, as is their wont, went the ZPGers one better by putting into force in the 1970s a compulsory limit of one baby per woman per lifetime.) . . .

While the population controllers seem to have given up for advanced countries, they are still big on population control for the Third World. It’s true that if you look at these countries, you see a lot of people starving and in bad economic shape. But it is an elementary fallacy to attribute this correlation to numbers of the population as cause.

In fact, population generally follows movement in standards of living; it doesn’t cause them. Population rises when the demand for labor, and living standards rise, and vice versa. A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development. Hong Kong, for example, has one of the densest populations in the world, and yet its standard of living is far higher than the rest of Asia, including, for example, the thinly populated Sinkiang province of China. . . .

The Third World suffers from a lack of economic development due to its lack of rights of private property, its government-imposed production controls, and its acceptance of government foreign aid that squeezes out private investment. The result is too little productive savings, investment, entrepreneurship, and market opportunity. What they desperately need is not more UN controls, whether of population or of anything else, but for international and domestic government to let them alone. Population will adjust on its own. But, of course, economic freedom is the one thing that neither the UN nor any other bureaucratic outfit will bring them.close quote (Read more)

Obama Gives $737 Million Dollar Loan To Solar Company Connected To Nancy Pelosi’s Brother In Law

open quote
STEP 1: Today the Department of Energy announced $1 Billion in new loans to solar companies…

DOE announced a $737 million loan guarantee to help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve.

STEP 2: SolarReserve is partnered with a company called PCG – Pacific Corporate Group…

STEP 3: The number two guy at Pacific Corporate Group is Ronald Pelosi. Coincidence???close quote (Read more)

***

Green Jobs = Transferring public money to your political friends. (And the suckers think they’re saving the planet)

Another stretched global warming claim

open quote
Forests across the world dying off as climate warms

The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.

Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.

Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer.close quote (Read more)

Okay, so it’s not warmer temperature killing the trees, it’s an invasive species. To blame this on civilization, you need two degrees of separation.

Not beyond the realm of possibility, but it fits the pattern of global warming hysteria. Here are long lists of things blamed on global warming:

whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/11/everything_is_caused_by_global.html
www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2045/