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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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THIS IS *NOT* FROM THE RONALD REAGAN CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES.

If you’ll remember, the Kyoto Protocol (can we call it “defunct”, yet?) allowed reforestation efforts to compensate for the emissions of excess carbon dioxide.  Imagine the kerfuffle in the environmental community at a recent study published in Nature, the preeminent science journal in Britain. 

In a discovery that has left climate scientists gasping, researchers have found that the earth’s vegetation is churning out vast quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent even than CO2. This is not a product of trees and plants rotting, which everyone already knew was a source of methane; it is an entirely natural side-effect of plant growth that scientists had somehow missed. Yet it is by no means trivial: preliminary estimates suggest that living trees and plants account for about 10 to 30 per cent of the methane entering the atmosphere.

I guess what strikes me the hardest is the fact that 10-30% of the current contribution to greenhouse gas production has JUST NOW been found!  The announcements, warnings, and threats coming from the “sky-is-falling” community for the last decade and more simply didn’t prepare me for anything remotely like this.  Haven’t we been assured that the science was strong, that the predictions were well-founded, that the danger was real, and that *WE* were responsible?

And now? 

...the new research highlights the astonishing complexity of environmental science. Measures to combat climate change that once seemed simple common sense are turning out to be anything but.

Wait a minute!!  Doesn’t that sound a lot like what the “evil-humans-are-at-fault” skeptics have been saying…...?  That the earth’s climate system is incredibly complex and the idea that we know everything we need to know in order to manipulate it for our benefit is simply false?  Well, what about this? 

Everyone knows fossil fuel power stations are hefty producers of CO2 and need urgently to be replaced. Yet they are now also recognised as hefty producers of aerosols - tiny particles in the atmosphere that play a key role in reflecting the sun’s heat back into space. The scientific consensus was that this is a minor benefit of fossil fuel burning. But last month Nature published new research showing aerosols may be twice as effective at keeping the earth cool as was thought. Suddenly, wholesale closure of power stations no longer seems such a good idea.

  I don’t know how to sum it up better than the article does. 

Climate scientists would have us believe there is no doubt about the basics of global warming and the time for action is now. The recent spate of large revisions of the facts tells a different story. Yet politicians are still being pressed to do the impossible: modify the huge, chaotic system that is the earth’s climate in ways guaranteed to be beneficial for all.

We should count ourselves lucky that, for once, politicians do not share such delusions of omniscience.

  SOME politicians, anyhow…...READ the whole thing.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/13 at 12:38 PM

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