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Sunday 13 December 2009


When groups invoke 'the children & grandchildren' as they do against drivers, they did about 'stopping the bomb', the Ozone Layer and now 'saving the planet', then for me it is the lowest form of politics. It tells me that rational debate is off the agenda and usually at the expense of the welfare of the very children that they claim to care about. I wrote to Bishop of Lincoln, John Saxbee, about Ken Livingstone's lies to London and asked if he likes his flock lied to from sheer profit motives? So far he has not responded.
Maybe Bishop John has been misled by the latest Meteorological Office ruse of announcing the last ten years as the hottest on record. Given that records have only been kept for 150 years and during that time we have, thankfully, been steadily climbing out of the Little Ice Age, then it is to be expected but it remains that 'hot', as it may have been, the warming had already stopped about ten years ago too and there has even been a drop in global temperature recently. So this is another case of a dishonest sleight of hand to hide that there has been no warming since 1998 proving Nicholas Stern's predictions wrong.


Dear Bishop Jackie,

I know you are an honest man and a man of the people. You may be interested in my comments to Ken Livingstone who lied to the people of London on Saturday. (Idiots don't get where he did). How ungodly to believe that mankind can choose how the planet was meant to be when for 99% of its life it has been hostile to mankind. How ungodly to talk of “saving a planet” when in due time it will return to a hostile state, unfit for humans and eventually be consumed by the Sun. So do you enjoy your people being misled like this?

There are two fraudulent industries which, because of your trusting nature, you support. Both cost lives, affect your people’s welfare and both are making fortunes from flawed statistics and lies — the Climate Change Industry and the Road Safety Industry. Please read the lies that Livingstone told London as the people of Lincolnshire are being told them too, at
www.notoecotown.com

Regards, Keith Peat.
See the Ken Livingstone letter under: Warming nonsense tag.

Sunday 6 December 2009

Livingstone lies to London


Dear Mr Livingstone. I listened to your comments on climate change today, 5/12 and what you told London was either blatant propaganda and untrue or you are genuinely oblivious to the facts of the matter. Either way Londoners were being misled.

1) There is no 'denial', as you imply, that climate changes and you know full well the debate is only whether or not mankind and in particular, CO2 is the cause. Fact is, if it were not for massive climate change, mankind would not be here at all. For 99% of the planet's life it has been far too hostile for us and will return to that no matter what we do. Question: Who says the planet, how we like it, is its natural or moderate state and how it is supposed to be?

2)You said you know no recognised or eminent scientists who disagree with AGW/ACC. What about the 30,000 signatories of the Oregon Petition, 9000 Phds? Isn't London entitled to hear about them? Oh of course you don't think so because you think it is OK for people like UEA/CRU, to continue to refuse to disclose its science measurements that tend to disprove ACC from people too; especially other scientists. And no this was not a one off email as you told London, it was a series from several CRU people all reacting to fair applications for answers, eventually via FOI, for their methods and a conspiracy (there is no other word) to deny access by destroying the information and indeed emails too. Some were about how to avoid FOI as well. I have read them all and they should be read in the context of the questions being asked of them chronologically. Now do tell London about that if you are really a straight chap.

2) Lawson et al. He doesn't need to be a scientist to read science. Scientists write papers for people like me and Lord Blaby to read. He does and so do I. But why not tell London that Nicholas Stern, one of the prime movers of ACC, is an economists, not a scientist either and that none of those were scientists who wrote the IPCC summary which is being referred to and caused even IPCC scientists to object to it. But, unlike Lawson, these are telling the rest of us to take the hair shirt but resent any queries about it.

3) Floods: Throughout living history there have been floods and major weather events. London has always had loads of rain. The old American image is of a foggy rainy London. All that has changed is that modern media gets every smattering of news to us instantly instead of a 2 minute newsreel clip in black and white a week later.

But it is what is at stake here that is crucial. If the claim is wrong, how many people will we kill from the economic costs of this nonsense for no good reason? The pretense is that taking action will not cost anything so we should do it. Throwing away untold billions into the Climate Change Industry will mean less hospitals, medicine, A&E, heat, warmth and so people will die for certain if all this is nonsense. Our Grandkids will struggle to eat and keep warm. Is that what you want? So our side says there are too many faults in these model based theories to start killing people yet. When the authors,(CRU) refuse point blank to produce their evidence and conspire to bury it and wipe it out, as they have done, then yes that should be a worry to 'a man of the people' like you shouldn't it?

And CO2, a natural life giving gas which at 380 ppm is still at the low end? The planet was at its most vibrant and lushest when it was at about 1500 ppm.
Keith Peat

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Wind: The real cost.



£250BN: THE REAL COST OF WIND POWER Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:36:15 The-real-cost-of-wind-power Sunday Express November 15,2009 £250BN:


THE REAL COST OF WIND POWER A report has exposed the true costs of wind generated electricity By Eugene Henderson THE Government's renewable energy strategy is in tatters after a report exposing the true costs of generating electricity by wind power.

An internal document from the National Grid, seen by the Sunday Express, says wind turbine energy will at times cost over 3,000 per cent more than conventional power. (that's 30 TIMES1 Industry experts say over-reliance on wind power could mean fuel poverty for consumers, as older power plants reach the end of their working lives while Britain's new generation of nuclear stations is still a long way off completion. Some experts claim the cost of upgrading the nation's electricity grid so it is possible to use all the renewable energy could be £250billion or 10 times the Government's estimates.


The revelations will make uncomfortable reading for Gordon Brown and his team, who have pinned much of their hopes of meeting carbon emission targets on wind power.

Professor Ian Fells, Emeritus Professor of Energy Conversion at Newcastle University, said: "For a long time I have thought that the wind power bubble would burst. I think that's starting to happen. "Ed Miliband tells people that to oppose wind farms is morally indefensible, but as more people start to realise the reality of what wind power actually offers, that will change."

The National Grid document, Accessing Renewable Energy, deals with the issue of "balancing the grid" to get the right amount of power from different sources across the UK so that it can maintain a supply to customers. It says wind power could cost "£300 £800 per mega watt hour (MWH) compared to conventional generation at £23 per MWH".

With generating capacity from wind "increasing rapidly", the document says the company is presented with "a range of challenges" in managing output. It talks clearly of the "need to curtail wind" because "conventional power is more economic".

A National Grid spokeswoman said the formula for working out the figures was "very complex". She said no one had actually paid such a high price for wind power and that the figures related to possible costs on the futures market. But an energy industry insider said: "These facts make for interesting, if not worrying reading.

"When they have too much power the Grid bids to shut down operators, but you can't just switch a big power station off and then hope the wind blows. By the same measure, if the wind doesn't blow you can't simply start up a power station at the flick of a switch. It will cost. "What they are saying is that wind farms will be producing power which will not be used, and it's the taxpayer who'll be footing the bill. It's a double whammy because consumers are already paying extra on their fuel bills to fund renewable energy." (If it were "not being used" what happens to it? This is nonsense - energy does not simply disappear down a drain or into thin air. If it IS generated and not used where wanted, it must and will be dissipated in other ways - normally as heat - unless it can be stored, which of course it cannot sensibly be. Surely what happens is that the wind farm simply does not generate the power in the first place? We still pay the fixed costs of course)

Under the Renewables Obligation, an incentive scheme to generate more green electricity, six per cent of everyone's electricity bill is paid to the Government to fund research. This week Lloyds and RBS said they were involved in a loans scheme offering £700million to onshore windfarm firms, which will be matched by the European Investment Bank. The power industry watchdog Ofgem says electricity prices could rise by 60 per cent by 2012, leaving many in fuel poverty.

Prof Fells said that while wind turbines provide such a small amount of power about two per cent of the country's energy needs few customers notice the extra on their bills. "Last year subsidies paid out on wind and landfill gas was £1billion. By 2020 that figure will be £30billion. That could subsidise six nuclear power stations. And they operate all the time and don't rely on what the weather is doing."

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "Wind is at the heart of our renewable energy strategy and it will stay there. A more realistic comparison of conventional and wind power would be £23 MWH compared to £30 or £80 MWH. "The figure of £250billion to upgrade the grid is also not a figure we recognise. It's estimated the cost to deliver our 2020 target is an additional £4.7billion with an additional £15billion needed for offshore grid connections."

Monday 2 November 2009

Tax Laundered Money Go Round.




The Nottingham Declaration whereby no matter who we vote in, in this case the Conservatives, they are hamstrung and tied to a liberal green policy based on very faulty computer modelling of climate predictions, already being disproved, since the planet is not doing what the model said it would.

The Declaration not only makes elections a farce because no council has autonomy in decisions but by a sequence of clever money laundering, up through Salix Ltd, The Carbon Trust and on to the Government, the councils are then bribed, with taxpayers money, to spend local money on madcap green policies which will cost the poor unfortunates even more money. By a Hans Christian Anderson myth that mankind can change climate and destroy the planet, only politicians could imagine that amount of power being vested in mere mortals and then expect them to pay for it too.

This control freakery government is using our own money so that even Conservative councils follow their expensive pied piper to a liberal induced penury. But in this instance, he who pays doesn’t get to call the tune. Why not just pay our councils grants directly and without strings so that they can act unfettered as the electorate imagined it elected them to do?

So before we get to the next election, can the ELDC leaders please let me know exactly what they are doing about this undemocratic and costly money laundering?

Wednesday 21 October 2009

A track record of climate models.


COOLING, WARMING AND THE TRACK RECORD OF CLIMATE MODELS
Norm Kalmanovitch

The pollution resulting from the rapid uncontrolled post war industrial expansion spawned two environmentalist movements. One group primarily composed of physical scientists and engineers set about to directly address the pollution problems by developing facilities and legislative controls that have to date virtually eliminated industrial contamination of soil, water and air. A second group primarily composed of activists with little or no physical science background did nothing but protest against industry without ever having addressed a single environmental problem for which they created a solution. While the physical scientists and engineers worked quietly with industry solving the environmental problems, the ideology driven environmentalist activists, used dramatic alarmist rhetoric to gain media control and have become a dominant political force capable of forcing their self serving ideologies on the general public with impunity.The Earth entered a cooling phase in 1942, and by 1970 the environmentalists found a way to blame this cooling on industrial expansion. The concept was that particulate matter from fossil fuel usage was blocking energy from the sun giving this cooling effect. This concept was incorporated as a parameter in the crude climate models of the time, and the predictions from models run by James Hansen in 1971 projected fifty years of further cooling from the increased use of fossil fuels. Only four years later, and in spite of the continued increase in fossil fuel usage global cooling came to an end, proving that the models did not have a proper physical basis for relating fossil fuel usage to global cooling. By 1988, after 13 years of global warming the ideological environmentalists developed a new tact for blaming fossil fuels. The British Government had embarked on a political campaign to promote their nuclear industry and attack the powerful coal unions by creating alarmist scenarios of "runaway global warming" resulting from CO2 produced by coal and other fossil fuels. This was entirely political in nature with absolutely no scientific backing, but it did make the perfect weapon for the environmentalists to promote their anti energy (and anti humanity) ideology. All that was needed was some scientific justification. As was done in 1971, climate models which were now far more sophisticated provided the science backing. Instead of blaming fossil fuels for blocking incoming solar radiation, the models removed this parameter and replaced it with a newly contrived parameter that now related global warming to the effect of fossil fuel sourced CO2 on the outgoing thermal radiation from the Earth. This model also produced by James Hansen, projected warming for the next century because of the fossil fuel CO2 emissions that were increasing at a continued accelerated rate. As with the 1971 model, the 1988 model was proven to be false when global warming ended after
1998 even as CO2 emissions continued to rise at unprecedented rates. To make matters worse since 2002, the Earth has been cooling making all of the projections clearly in the wrong direction. By even the most basic standards of ethical science, models that first predict cooling from fossil fuel usage that are discredited just four years later when warming occurs with increased usage, and then predict warming from fossil fuel usage and are again discredited ten years later as cooling reoccurs with increased usage, would be declared absolutely invalid; but when ideology is involved science protocol is totally abandoned. As a result of the alarmist predictions of the 1988 climate models of Hansen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed under the auspices of the United Nations. This body was given a science mandate to investigate the possibility of human effects on climate to determine if the projections of Hansen were valid. The true nature of the IPCC was not that of a science based body, but that of a political body to give scientific legitimacy to false alarmist predictions in order to meet a political self serving environmentalist agenda. Since its inception, the IPCC has used its position of authority to promote its agenda to the detriment of science and even more importantly to the detriment of the global population. From 1997 to 1998 the average global temperature increased by over half a degree C and from 1998 to 1999 the average global temperature fell by over half a degree C. This was due to an extraordinary el Nino and has nothing to do with either the greenhouse effect or CO2 emissions (CO2 emissions increased from 24.0gt/y in 1997 to 24.2gt/y in 1998 to 24.4gt/y in 1999). An honest scientific body would have made some sort of statement to this effect, but the IPCC in their 2001 Third Assessment Report and particularly in their Summary for Policy Makers for this report not only made no mention of the fact that from 1998 to 1999 the Earth cooled more than it had ever cooled during the entire global temperature record, but emphatically stated that from 1997 to 1998 the Earth had warmed more than it ever had. This is an absolute violation of science ethics because the policy makers were purposely misinformed with alarmist rhetoric. This same 2001 report also stated that the observed global warming for the past century which they stated was attributable to CO2 emissions was measured at
0.60°C + 0.20°C. This is only 0.006°C per year making the el Nino temperature spike over eighty times greater than what the IPCC stated was attributable to CO2 emissions, so it is clear that this was stated for the purpose of politically motivated alarmism and not to properly convey information in a scientifically justified manner. The 2001 IPCC report also included the infamous MBH98 Hockey Stick temperature proxy which used physical temperature measurement data up to and including 1998 which gave the alarmist impression of twice the 20th century warming because 1999 was not included. The Hockey Stick graph became the pivotal evidence that convinced governments around the world to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, that has resulted in such detrimental effects to the global population and global economy. In this regard the el Nino temperature spike of 1998 may be considered the most significant climate event in recent history, and when one considers the hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people starving because of Kyoto biofuel initiatives that has literally taken their food away and made it into â Kyoto friendly fuel, this el Nino might also be considered the most tragic climate event as well. Through diligence and hard work physical scientists were able to correct most of the environmental problems that had been created through industrialization, but there is no scientific effort capable of undoing the damage caused to the global population by the ideological environmentalists. This issue is now out of the hands of the scientists and the only salvation for the global population is the media who must readopt their lost journalistic integrity and expose the true nature of this global fraud. Norm Kalmanovitch Calgary Canada PS This link to a 1999 article is very enlightening http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/ba299.pdf%22%3ehttp:/www.ncpa.org/pdfs/ba299.pdf

Thursday 24 September 2009

ELDC say fiddling taxpayer's money is 'personal'



Re my legitimate query about councillors claiming expenses already covered by benefit? Nothing 'personal' about it.
Here is the response from the Ch Ex. ELDC.
Nigel Howells

Dear Mr Peat

Thank you for your recent enquiry. I have no information on the personal circumstances of Councillors in relation to disability matters, as raised in your e-mail. This is a personal matter and entirely for them.

Yours sincerely

Sent on behalf of Nigel Howells

So am I just to cease asking? I don't thinks so. Why should these fiddles be allowed at our expense?
Hi,

This is not personal or about specific councillors it is about the 40p Mileage allowance available to councillors already claiming upper rate mobility. Both come from the tax payer. So this is not a personal matter at all .

Why is this category of official able to claim the full mileage allowance from public funds? Was this ever considered? If not why not? And now it has been raised, what possible justification can there be to continue it?

This is a fair enquiry deserving of a good response; ideally along the lines of thanks for drawing this to our attention and yes something will be done to adjust allowances accordingly or else a detailed explanation as to why this is not deemed appropriate. Only that kind of response addresses this appalling discovery.

On the other hand I can draft a press release of this exchange if Mr Howells would prefer it that way.

Please re-consider the question.

Regards

Keith Peat.
Watch this space: Well we didn't have to wait long.
To paraphrase the response from Mr Howells: It starts with some waffle about the Inland Revenue rules on what tax should be paid. (Totally irrelevant) But he seems to imagine that it can be justified that these 'poor' disabled council officials have special needs, so it's OK if they get more from the council than other disabled people who are not council officials? He also assumes that these cars are being used by disabled councillors too. No not all of them. So yes there is an element of fraud too or obtaining a pecuniary advantage but that is not for Mr Howells to worry about. Keep Watching this space.

Tuesday 15 September 2009

The BBC,Mail and the phantom ships.

'we can only conclude that these are phantom ships, failing to penetrate a previously impenetrable trade route, dropping off phantom cargo at phantom port towns.'

ECO-CHURNALISM: MEDIA 'RE-OPEN' NORTH EASTERN PASSAGE The Register, 14 September 2009 <
By Andrew Orlowski

One of Russia's commercial maritime trade routes for the past 70 years has been "re-opened" by a press hungry for dramatic Global Warming scare stories - but who failed to check the most basic facts.
 
I've traced this fascinating example of "eco-churnalism" - peddled by both BBC Radio and its website, the Daily Mail, The Independent, Reuters and many others - back to its origins, with a press release from a German shipping group. But first of all - what on Earth is the Northern Passage?
 
Also called the Northeast Passage or North Sea Passage, it's a trade route that in summer months links the North European and Siberian ports to Asia, around the Arctic Circle. Orient-bound traffic heads east, then South via the Bering Straight. Much of the Siberian North coast lies outside the Arctic Circle, and the route offered significant gains over the alternatives via Suez or the Cape. But until technological advances in the early 20th Century it was considered too hazardous for commercial operation.
 
Since the 1930s the route has seen major ports spring up, carrying over 200,000 tons of freight passing through each year, although this declined with the fall of the Soviet Union.
 
But none of this ever happened, we learned on Saturday. The Independent reported that the journey had been traversed for the very first time, proclaiming that two German ships had completed "the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage", proclaiming it "a triumph for man, a disaster for mankind". BBC Radio followed suit.
 
Others have followed the BBC.
 
Climate change: too good to be true It didn't take long to trace the origin of the story. On Wednesday, German shipping group Beluga claimed "the first non-Russian commercial vessels to make it through the Northeast Passage from Asia to Europe".
 
You can still read their press release, here. Journalists failed to challenge Beluga's claim that the Northeastern Passage was "formerly impenetrable", but bloggers had debunked it within seconds.
 
(See An Englishman's Castle here - and Richard D North's EU Referendum blog here and here.)
 
North unearthed a fascinating account of the past 80 years of this sea route (pdf, 17pg) by a retired mariner Jan Drent, who made the Europe to Asia Northeast Passage himself. Drent writes that the Soviet Union offered to open the route to global commerce in 1967, but with war in the Middle East closing the Suez, Russia didn't want to offend its Arab allies.
 
In their haste to bring us Thermageddon, journalists now simply manufacture the evidence. But wasn't the recent warming period - which started began in the mid-1970s and with temperatures peaking in the late-1990s - a contributory factor? Arctic Ice has recovered the past couple of years, but it's still down on 30 years ago.
 
As it happens, the thaw has helped, but isn't the primary reason, according to maritime historians.
 
"In the past ten years voyages between the northern coast and Japan and Canada have demonstrated how modern ice-strengthened vessels and contemporary ice forecasting have extended the navigation season."
Ignore all that, however. If the BBC is to remain trusted, we can only conclude that these are phantom ships, failing to penetrate a previously impenetrable trade route, dropping off phantom cargo at phantom port towns. Copyright 2009, The Register

Monday 17 August 2009

The big CO2 'Fraud'





CO2, CLIMATE FORCING AND CLIMATE MODELS

Norm Kalmanovitch
'...................clearly an open and shut case of scientific fraud...........'


Enough data has already been released to unequivocally prove scientific fraud. All of the global temperature datasets that include the actual physical measurements of the global temperature clearly demonstrate that there was a rapid rise in global temperature from around 1910 to about 1942, followed by a slow drop in global temperature from 1942 to 1975, at which time the world reverted to warming which all global temperature datasets clearly show ended after 1998, with a cooling trend that is still continuing.

Global emissions increased by just half a billion tonnes of CO2 per year during the global warming of about half a degree C from 1910 to 1942. This equates to each gigatonne increase in CO2 emissions causing a one degree C rise in global temperature.

'..............but instead there was nothing but cooling...........'
As a result of increased CO2 emissions from post-war industrialization, from 1942 to 1975 global emissions increase from under 4 billion tonnes of CO2 per year in 1942 to over 20 billion tonnes of CO2 by 1975.

During the cooling that occurred from 1942 to 1975 the global emissions increase by 16 billion tonnes of CO2 per year and based on the previous warming this should have caused 16°C of global warming but instead there was nothing but cooling.

It was only 13 years after this global cooling with contemporaneous rapid increase in global CO2 emissions that the climate models incorporated a forcing parameter that related global warming to increases in CO2 concentration on the basis that this increase came from humans.

Since these are supposed climate specialists, these modelers would be fully aware that the globe cooled from 1942 to 1975 as the atmospheric CO2 concentration grew. The relationship of the forcing parameter of the climate models of 5.35ln(C/C0) in which C0 represents the reference level and C represents the new level of CO2 concentration, clearly shows that increases in CO2 concentration will produce an increase in temperature. This did not happen over the entire period from 1942 to 1975 and therefore this parameter is clearly not valid.

The modelers also related global warming directly to human sourced CO2 emissions, but these were increasing dramatically as the global temperature dropped over these 33 years, making this relationship completely contrary to physical observation.

Since physical data already existed that completely falsified the forcing parameter of the climate models long before the models were run using this forcing parameter, and this had to be known by the modelers, it is clearly an open and shut case of scientific fraud.

If the modelers were unaware that this physical data falsified their forcing parameter it is still fraud because the modelers misrepresented their credentials as climate specialists.

Either way it is still fraud, and as the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and global emissions of CO2 both continue to increase while global temperatures continue to drop the fraud becomes more and more obvious.

Norm Kalmanovitch
Calgary Canada

Tuesday 9 June 2009

Arctic sea ice back to normal


'............According to thermometer and satellite data global surface temperatures are not increasing, the oceans aren't warming, and now it seems not even the Arctic is melting........'

Jennifer Marohasy, 8 June 2009


NOTHING seems to be going to plan for those who believe in anthropogenic
global warming and an imminent climate crisis. According to thermometer
and satellite data global surface temperatures are not increasing, the
oceans aren't warming, and now it seems not even the Arctic is melting.

The latest satellite data on Arctic sea ice extent suggests that there
is now a normal amount of sea ice in the Arctic - normal is defined as
about average for the period 1979 - 2007.

And when all is said and done, if the climate system is not accumulating
heat, the AGW hypothesis is invalid.

**************

Notes and Links

The graph is from 'Daily Updated Time series of Arctic sea ice area and
extent derived from SSMI data provided by NANSEN',
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and
-extent-in-arctic

More discussion at WUWT on sea ice extent,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/07/nansen-corrects-sea-ice-data-sea-
ice-extent-now-greater-normal-for-most-of-aprilmay/

The oceans aren't warming:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/05/ocean-cooling-falsifies-global
-warming-hypothesis/

Global surface temperatures aren't increasing:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/05/global-temperature-revisited/


Tuesday 19 May 2009

WILL ANYBODY NOTICE GLOBAL COOLING?



WILL ANYBODY NOTICE GLOBAL COOLING?
.........Something is terribly wrong with the official international science bodies such as the IPCC who have not come forward and properly informed the world leaders of current global temperatures.........


Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]

It is inconceivable that even after a decade since global warming ended and seven years into a cooling trend with no end of cooling in sight, that world leaders are unaware of these facts and are still pursuing initiatives to stop global warming. Something is terribly wrong with the official international science bodies such as the IPCC who have not come forward and properly informed the world leaders of current global temperatures.

Something is terribly wrong with the individual government science bodies who did not come forward and inform their own leaders when it was certain that global warming had ended, or when there was sufficient data to claim that we are now in a cooling trend.

It is not as though this is highly guarded secret data that can only be accessed by a limited group of people. The global temperature data is in fact readily available from several public sites and can be downloaded at no cost.

For the past year Friends of Science has been maintaining a graph of satellite temperature data and atmospheric CO2 concentration data on their website www.friendsofscience.org

This graph is updated every month as the new data becomes available.
The cooling trend that started in 2002 is highlighted by a straight line best fit posted on this graph. The numerical value for this trend is 0.25°C/decade of cooling!

By contrast the forcing parameter of the IPCC climate models would dictate that the effect of the 10ppmv increase in CO2 should cause a temperature increase of 0.15°C/decade.

If in fact there is any validity to the claims of CO2 increases causing warming; the fact that we are cooling at twice the rate that the climate models say we should be warming, is a clear indication that natural forces are about three times stronger than the maximum possible effects from CO2 increases.
Quantum physics clearly demonstrates that the effect of current increases in CO2 can have only a small and diminishing effect on global temperature with further increases in concentration.
Since the natural effects dominate, and physics dictates that the effect of increasing emissions is only a small fraction of the effect commonly accepted; it is clear that any initiatives aimed at reducing CO2 emissions for the purpose of reducing global warming are entirely without merit and serve no purpose whatsoever.

This is not a trivial issue because these initiatives to stop global warming have caused great suffering to the poorest people of the world. Biofuel initiatives have caused a global food crisis as food crops were forced to compete with biofuel crops driving the price of basic food staples beyond the means of the poor. The attempt to replace inexpensive coal fired power plants with very expensive and unreliable alternate energy sources such as wind power, has raised the cost of power not only affecting the poor, but also industry further reducing the ability to compete with countries using inexpensive power to manufacture products.

Unfortunately the AGW concept is so engrained in the public psyche through the graphic propaganda of the last several years that all verbal arguments against this ideology fall on deaf ears, and get shouted down by an indoctrinated crowd. While these people are deaf they are not blind, and no matter how loud the shouting, a graphic representation of increasing CO2 and decreasing global temperatures will be seen above the din.

If every presentation contained a graph similar to the one on the Friends of Science website this "visual" will eventually get in front of leaders who will be forced to reconsider the global warming initiatives that have been so costly to the world.

Norm Kalmanovitch
Calgary, Canada
www.friendsofscience.org

Friday 15 May 2009

Clean energy's dirty little secret.



CLEAN ENERGY'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Adam Smith Institute, 13 May 2009


Dr Fred Hansen

The political and international divide over green energy politics is growing. Not only are the prospects of over ambitious plans such as Koyoto II getting gloomier in the ongoing financial crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that the green renewable energy issues could create problems of the same magnitude as our present oil-dependency. As the Atlantic reports in its May issue , the exploding demand for hybrid cars and windmills is likely to create a bottle neck in the supply of a commodity with the exotic name of neodymium.

Neodymium is a crucial material for build lightweight permanent magnets "that make the Prius motors zoom" and are needed for the generators of wind mills as well. In fact, the present production of neodymium would have to be doubled in order to make just a few million electric cars. The main pit for neodymium in the US, California's Mountain Pass, has recently been closed after a series of leaks released hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste into the environment. The dirty little secret of green cars and windmills is that the neodymium has to be yielded from rare-earth ore, which are regularly contaminated with radioactive thorium.

So much for the green ideologues and main stream media hypocrites who don't accept nuclear energy with zero CO2 emission as clean energy.

Wednesday 6 May 2009

Renewables with a hefty price tag


Renewables target comes with a hefty price tag

'........The costs of green policies are out of control, and unaffordable. £9 billion here, £10 billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money..........'


Andrew Tyrie M.P.

According to an independent study commissioned in support of the Renewable Energy Strategy Consultation, £10 billion of new investment of our electricity network is needed to meet the 2020 renewables target, a cost incurred by transmission companies such as the National Grid. The cost of connecting offshore wind farms makes up around 75% of this figure, based on a 35% renewable electricity scenario.

A further £2.3 billion a year will be required to cover the cost of ancillary services to meet system balancing requirements. Meanwhile Open Europe reckons that the on-going cost of renewables policy will be £9 billion.

National Grid and Scottish Transmission Companies are currently busy pondering how they are to meet such targets by 2020 whilst delivering necessary network capacity.

The figure is confirmed in a written answer from the Department of Energy to a parliamentary question (PQ: 2007/4553) from Andrew Tyrie MP, which admits that the plans will also require an estimated £10 billion of new investment in the grid, plus an on-going £2.3 billion a year.

And there are good reasons to believe that the government's "35% renew­ables scenario" will simply not work in technical terms, even after this massive investment. The costs of green policies are out of control, and unaffordable. £9 billion here, £10 billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Rise of Sea Levels "Greatest Lie ever told"


Rise of Sea Levels "Greatest Lie ever told"

'......as an expert reviewer on the IPCC's last two reports he discovered that not a single one of the 22 contributing authors was a sea level expert.......'

Dr Morner

For anyone living in London or Mablethorpe who has been considering buying a boat to cope with the imminent rise in sea levels that Al Gore has promised us: good news. London and Skegness are not about to be swept away by biblical floods. Nor are the seas going to rise up and swallow all those tiny Pacific islands; we are not going to suffer the same fate as Atlantis.

The revelation comes in Christopher Booker's Telegraph column focussing on the work of Nils-Axel Mörner, a physicist who has, for the last 35 years, been studying sea levels world-wide. Dr Mörner's conclusions? That "all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story."

He asserts that the sea level has not risen for the last 50 years, and that if any rise does occur this century "it will not be more than 10cm." And how can he be so sure? Well, unlike most sea level studies which are based on computer modelling, Dr Mörner has actually headed out into the field to conduct his research.

One of his most shocking discoveries was the way the IPCC was able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year: their experts had based the figure on a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a rise of 2.3mm. They then adjusted the entire global sea-level projection upwards by 2.3mm, creating an upward trend in the graphs. But we shouldn't really be surprised -- when Dr Mörner was asked to act as an expert reviewer on the IPCC's last two reports he discovered that not a single one of the 22 contributing authors was a sea level expert.

Rise of Sea Levels "Greatest Lie ever told"


Rise of Sea Levels "Greatest Lie ever told" ?

For anyone living in London or Mablethorpe who has been considering buying a boat to cope with the imminent rise in sea levels that Al Gore has promised us: good news. London and Skegness is not about to be swept away by biblical floods. Nor are the seas going to rise up and swallow all those tiny Pacific islands; we are not going to suffer the same fate as Atlantis.

The revelation comes in Christopher Booker's Telegraph column focussing on the work of Nils-Axel Mörner, a physicist who has, for the last 35 years, been studying sea levels world-wide. Dr Mörner's conclusions? That "all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story."

He asserts that the sea level has not risen for the last 50 years, and that if any rise does occur this century "it will not be more than 10cm." And how can he be so sure? Well, unlike most sea level studies which are based on computer modelling, Dr Mörner has actually headed out into the field to conduct his research.

One of his most shocking discoveries was the way the IPCC was able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year: their experts had based the figure on a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a rise of 2.3mm. They then adjusted the entire global sea-level projection upwards by 2.3mm, creating an upward trend in the graphs. But we shouldn't really be surprised -- when Dr Mörner was asked to act as an expert reviewer on the IPCC's last two reports he discovered that not a single one of the 22 contributing authors was a sea level expert.



Thursday 30 April 2009

Lord Stern- Scaremonger in chief?


Sunday telegraph Lord Stern, 'Scaremonger in chief', exposed by simple blunders How come "the world's leading expert on climate change" doesn't even know how much carbon dioxide there currently is in the air, wonders Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker Last Updated: 10:48PM BST 25 Apr 2009 Comments 51 Comment on this article Lord Stern predicts that global warming will make the Arctic an ideal habitat for alligators Confronted last week with the unfolding horror story of the Budget, we might have been grateful for the light relief provided by Lord Stern of Brentford, who told us how, unless we halt global warming, we can look forward to the sight of alligators gambolling at the North Pole, and Florida and Bangladesh sinking beneath the sea.
Since he produced the 570-page Stern Review in 2006, which Tony Blair described as a most important report on the future ever produced by this Government, this former Treasury official and chief economist to the World Bank has won extraordinary adulation. In the US Congress he is acclaimed as the worlds leading expert on climate change, vying with Al Gore to be the worlds Scaremonger-in-Chief.

Budget 2009: Government eyes end to higher rate tax relief for pensions Today Lord Stern is head of the LSE's Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, launched by a billionaire investment manager to advise on the fast-burgeoning global market in every kind of "low carbon technology", "emissions trading" and all the other growth areas associated with the climate change industry. Last week he was in the news for launching his new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

Unsurprisingly, there is no one for whom Lord Stern has more contempt than those he calls the "deniers" of man-made global warming. He told The Daily Telegraph last week that they "look more and more like those who denied the association between HIV and Aids, or smoking and cancer". In his book, he criticises the media for giving any space at all to such people, when "the balance of logic and evidence is 99 per cent or more to one".
But for a man whose whole case rests on the damage supposedly being done to the planet by carbon dioxide, it was somewhat disconcerting to see him quoted as saying that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have now reached "430 parts per million [ppm]". He said exactly the same last year in an interview with Prospect. The actual level is 388.97 ppm. It may seem a tiny point, but one might have expected "the world's leading expert on climate change" to have a rather surer grasp of a fact so central to his case.

Similarly, one would not expect a man whose institute is claimed to be "a world-leader in low carbon technologies" to claim, as he does in his book, that by next year wind energy "is set to account for 8 per cent of electricity generation in the UK", when the current figure is scarcely 1 per cent; or that "wind accounted for 35 per cent of total installed power capacity in the US in 2007", when two minutes on the internet could have shown him that wind power that year generated less electricity in the US than a single large coal-fired power station.
In fact, when the Stern Review came out in 2006, predicting that global warming could soon account for the extinction of 40 per cent of all species of life on earth, far from being universally lauded it was savagely criticised by some of the very people who might have been expected to praise it his fellow economists. No one was more excoriatory than the man on whose work Lord Stern claimed to have based many of his most scarifying predictions, the noted Dutch economist Dr Richard Tol.

Far from being a global-warming sceptic, Dr Tol has played a key part in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and wrote the UN Handbook on Methods for Climate Change Impact Assessment. But he could not have been more withering about the way the Stern Review went out of its way to cherry pick the most alarming possible predictions about the impacts of climate change and then to exaggerate them still further. Where Tol had, for instance, given a range of costs up to $14 per ton of CO2, while saying that the actual cost was "likely to be substantially smaller", Stern had more than doubled his figure, to $29 a ton. Stern's report, Tol pronounced, could be "dismissed as alarmist and incompetent", and his doomsday prophecies were simply "preposterous". Yet this is the man, reverentially treated by the BBC, the media and politicians everywhere as "the world's leading expert on climate change" so lost in his apocalyptic dreams that he doesn't even know something so basic to his cause as how much CO2 there is in the air we breathe.


By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent Last Updated: 8:05PM BST 20 Apr 2009

Editor's note: Co2 at 388 ppm is at the lower scale. The world was at its lushest and most abundant at about 3 times that figure and in fact at 200ppm we would be in trouble. KP

Friday 24 April 2009

Cost of Nottingham Declaration


CLIMATE TARGETS TO COST BRITISH FAMILIES £600 EVERY YEAR
Daily Mail, 22 April 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/Going-green-cost-families-600-year.html

By David Derbyshire

Tough new targets to tackle climate change will cost every household at least £600 a year, push more than a million people into poverty and send fuel bills soaring, experts warned yesterday.
The Chancellor announced the UK is to become the only country in the world to set legally binding 'carbon budgets' to combat global warming.

Under the scheme, ministers must slash Britain's greenhouse gas emissions by a third within the next 11 years - or face legal action and hefty fines.

The targets will be legally binding, even if every other country in the world continues to increase carbon emissions.

Critics said the targets, which include a drive to build more windfarms, would cost the economy £14billion a year by 2020 and would have only a negligible impact on climate change.
And green campaigners said the Government had squandered a chance to set
even tougher targets and help millions of households slash their fuel bills with improved energy efficiency.

The Government hopes it will set an example to other countries in the run-up to climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.

Environmental sceptic and author Bjorn Lomberg, of Copenhagen University, said: 'This is pure wishful thinking.

Green Budget: The Chancellor announced also announced £1 billion of funding for green initiatives and technologies, such as electric cars
'No country in the world has ever managed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by a third in just 11 years.

'It will cost billions of pounds and the net effect will be to reduce world temperatures by one-three thousandth of a degree by the end of the century.
'The financial crisis makes it even more unlikely that people will be willing to do this.'

The Government believes the bulk of the cuts can be made by improving energy efficiency, reducing petrol use and replacing gas and coal power stations with wind turbines.

However, its own advisers - the Committee on Climate Change - last year estimated the switch to a low-carbon economy would raise fuel bills, push more than 1.5million people into poverty and shrink the economy by around £14billion a year by 2020.

That is the equivalent of around £600 for every household.

FULL STORY at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/Going-green-cost-families-600-year.html

Monday 20 April 2009

'Antarctic Ice is growing'

ANTARCTIC ICE GROWING, NOT MELTING AWAY

The Australian, 18 April 2009
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html

By Greg Roberts

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread style public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins
ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recentdecades".

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said. The melting of sea ice - fast ice and pack ice - does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica,
these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. "I don't think there's any doubt it is contributing to what we've seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica," he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

Copyright 2009, TA

Thursday 16 April 2009

Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

WE MUSTN'T WARM TO THIS MYTH

The Northern Echo, 14 April 2009
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/features/4288446.We_mustn___t_warm_to_t
his_myth/

Peter Mullen

EVERY totalitarian regime needs its defining myth. With the Nazis, it
was the "Aryan" fantasy of racial purity.

With the USSR, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. With
secularised, semi-pagan Western societies in historic decline, it is
global warming.

Sometimes comparisons among these are alarming. For example, Ed
Miliband, the climate change minister, has said that opposing wind farms is "socially unacceptable".

How long before global warming denial becomes an offence, like holocaust denial?

The Government seizes approvingly on outrageous remarks by such as Dr James Hansen, who wrote in a national newspaper: "The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death."

What I find bewildering is that the Greens, who claim to care for the environment, are so strongly in favour of wind farms, which are a kind of pollution of the countryside. What's more, they don't work very efficiently. So why ruin the countryside for the sake of obsessed
environmentalists' gesture politics?

Millions of British people enjoy our glorious countryside as a natural environment which provides an antidote to the stress of urban life. It is nothing short of wickedness to foul this delight with useless wind farms.

To their credit, some governments are coming to see the uselessness of the wind turbines.

Germany and Spain are losing their enthusiasm for wind power because, as reported by The Scientific Alliance, "...of the need to run back-up conventional power stations".

It is meteorologists and other scientists who point out that settled spells of either very hot or very cold weather - the weather that creates the greatest demand for electrical power - occur when there is no wind. So, when electricity demand is at its peak, wind turbines are static and produce nothing.

Global warming is not indisputable. Thousands of highly qualified and experienced scientists question it. But the problem is that global warming is not being treated as a theory, a possibility, but as a truth of nature on a par with the law of gravity. It is the unassailable myth of the new totalitarians.

I wouldn't want you to think this is just Mullen shooting from the hip. I have been avidly reading scientific papers and reports and, while there are those who believe global warming is taking place, there are thousands of reputable scientists who deny it.

This is entirely as it should be. Rigorous examination of hypotheses is the very basis of science. And this is what is being asked for by, among other intelligent sources, The Scientific Alliance. I quote: "The whole juggernaut of global warming is based on a framework which accepts the
International Panel on Climate Change's view of the enhanced greenhouse effect as indisputable truth. Hence the refusal to concede that any degree of scepticism or a different interpretation of evidence is legitimate.

So it is even more important for critical points to be raised and debate encouraged.

Scientific understanding will benefit from this: and the better the understanding, the better any necessary response can be formulated."

This is the reasonable approach and a long way from Ed Miliband's dark words about what is "socially acceptable" and the disgraceful invocation of "death trains".

Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London,
and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

Copyright 2009, TNE

And yes it is going that way too. Well said the good cleric. KP


Sunday 12 April 2009

Dr David Bellamy. Liverpool Daily Mail

Global warming theory has never been tested and is based on a series of computer models says Dr David Bellamy.

"Since 1998 there has been no rise in the average temperature of the world, although we pour 44 giga-tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

"There are now three times more polar bears in the world than 20 years ago when I was working in the Arctic."

So come off it East Lindsey, dont play the gloople wombling scare card to ruin our lives.

The World has cooled: Predictable responses

THE WORLD HAS COOLED: PREDICTED RESPONSES me@davidwhitehouse.com
Although the data is not yet finalised, the WMO has said that the 2008 annual global temperature will be 0.31 deg C above the average, that is lower than the constant level seen since 2001. The world has cooled - it's official. There has now been ten consecutive and consistent data points less than the 1998 record.The press releases either do not mention the trend (Friends of Earth) or say, accurately, that 2008 is the tenth warmest year on record. However, none point out that this makes 2008 the first year for over a decade when the errors in the measurement overlap the errors in the measurement for 1980 which was before the current phase of global warming. The Met Office says the cool 2008 (and presumably 2007) was due to la Nina which although present has been declining in strength all year.Care must be taken when looking at Met Office press releases concerning global warming. On 4th Jan 2007 they said 2007 was to be the warmest year ever - it wasn't by a long way. On 14th Dec 2006 they said that 2006 was a year for the record books when 2006 was actually the 6th warmest year on record. To be fair it did say on 3rd Jan 2008 that 2008 would be in the top ten years which it is - barely. This very poor track record in prediction must be set alongside what Dr Peter Stott says in the Met Office's current release..."Comparing observations with the expected response to man-made and natural drivers of climate change it is shown that global temperature is now over 0.7 °C warmer than if humans were not altering the climate."It doesn't seem that the observations and the predicted response, as evidenced by the Met Office's track record, has been anything other than very poor.Dr Stott also says that the world is 0.7 deg C warmer than what it would be without man's activities. This is nonsense. Looking at their own graphs 2001-2008 is about 0.20 deg C at most above the level of the 1970s. Look for yourself, the link is here and here and here

The data for 2009 will be fascinating. Will the Met Office issue another
press release in January predicting that it will be another top ten year when there is no la Nina?...........Councillors to note.




Nottingham Declaration

The Odious and undemocratic Nottingham Declaration

Some 380 local Authorities, including Lincoln City, County, East & West Lindsey are signatories to the Nottingham Declaration. See Here. This ties them to a totally anti global warming agenda of policies. That there has been no global warming for ten years now and that CO2 is not a primary, only slightly a green house gas, how much is all this nonsense costing us the community? And what alternative science have any of our councillors bothered to read? Do they accept Al Gore and the economist Stern lemming like then? Are they being led by a tiny minority of, often un-elected liberal green elite? Did you think that you voted for a main political party or an independent at the last election? Think again. You got the liberal green Nottingham Declaration whatever your vote.


My concern is not about anything specific, like re-cycling, but so long as that decision and all others like it have been taken and passed on their own merit by our local councillors individually. Membership of this pact means that the Council has made a commitment to policy on virtually all issues which then removes its autonomy and curtails your authority by virtue of it. I find that very undemocratic and it means that the council is now hamstrung to an agenda that most of us did not vote for or even believe.
The carrot of course is tax payer funding via a company called Salix and the Carbon Trust.
But the questions I ask is: Why should the council have to sign away democracy to get funding and how many councillors voted to be hamstrung like this?

I think these are very fair questions from someone genuinely concerned about local democracy. My local East Lindsey councillor David Andrews didn't even acknowledge my concern but then he probably cannot manage anything more taxing than a blocked drain. Those that did acknowledge and promised to ask questions never did get back to me.

So if you find a wind-farm spoiling your Wolds, an estate of 'eco friendly affordable housing' on your doorstep, a reduction in your waste disposal allowance a rise in your rates, take it from me the Nottingham Declaration will have something to do with it.

Friday 10 April 2009

WIND POWER IS A COMPLETE DISASTER

Financial Post, 8 April 2009
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx <http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx>

By Michael J. Trebilcock

There is no evidence that industrial wind power is likely to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world's most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power's unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM (one of Denmark's largest energy utilities) tells us that "wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions." The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that "Germany's CO2 emissions haven't been reduced by even a single gram," and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery.

Indeed, recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character. On the negative side of the environmental ledger are adverse impacts of industrial wind turbines on birdlife and other forms of wildlife, farm animals, wetlands and viewsheds.

FULL STORY at http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx <http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx>