Observations From the Back Row, 4-9-11

Rich Kozlovich

Obama finally embraces malaria victims — as political pawns

U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Rajiv Shah and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson win this week’s award for cynicism. In his column today (“When cuts lead to coffins“),  Gerson wrote:

So far in the budget debate, the Obama administration has drawn few bright lines, preferring to blur distinctions with concessions. But last week, a neon line was drawn by an unlikely administration official. Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, possesses the mildest of manners. Testifying before the House state and foreign operations subcommittee, however, Shah had this to say: “We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying. Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back, specifically…”

Apparently oblivious to the tens of millions who have been killed, and billions who have been stricken by malaria — including about one million children who die annually — courtesy of the 1972 U.S. EPA ban on DDT, Shah and Gerson are now surfing the malaria tragedy (with phony statistics) for the purpose of launching a political attack on budget-cutting Republicans.

My Take – All of a sudden they are worried about the poor children of the third world! Let’s put the DDT issue aside and come to a realization that for decades not a peep was heard from this crowd against the greenies while they worked against every form of development in these third world nations. They have worked to prevent hydroelectric dams from being built; they have convinced third world leaders to totally reject Genetically Modified Foods; they convinced leaders that chlorine was unhealthy in public water systems. They have promoted everything that is detrimental to growth and good health. And over these decades when did this crowd ever stand up to the greenies and say, “Enough! You are killing millions of children with the policies you promote!” Never! Now all of a sudden they are worried about the children.

Everything is the Basics!
The last time the price of oil topped $100 a barrel for an extended period, we ended up in a global financial meltdown. Is this time any different? Not much. All of the excessively financial leverage and fraudulent derivative wealth we had during the last melt down is still in place. Total debt to GDP levels in the US are about the same (370% of GDP or so). No reforms were made on Wall Street. Nobody at fault for the fraud that led to the last melt down went to jail, so behaviors haven't changed.

My Take - As one reader, Miguel Barrientos pointed out; It's not only oil. If you look at the prices of most commodities they are all at record highs or near the levels last seen around May of 2008. Check out [this site] to explore 30 year price history data.

It has also been pointed out that the entire Middle East is erupting at the same time. Why? What is the single driving force for such actions? These people have lived under tyrants and despotic rulers for centuries. Are we to believe they all came to have an overwhelming desire for democracy at the same time? This is in reality all about the price of energy and food. And the price of food has increased dramatically all over the world because we are turning food into gasoline. This was all about making first world greenies feel good about themselves, and now they are against biofuels because they say it is even more environmentally unfriendly than oil. That is always the problem with these promoters of the latest philosophical flavor of the day. They don’t really know what they are talking about. As a result they have no clue as to the outcome and when it turns sour they move on and leave devastation in their wake. They never have to pay the penalty for being wrong. It is time that is changed.

A lot of hot air: Wind farms 'working at just 21% of capacity'
Britain's wind farms produce far less electricity than their supporters claim – and cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on, a study from a conservation charity showed yesterday.  A damning report from the John Muir Trust found the UK’s heavily subsidised wind farms were working at just 21 per cent of capacity last year. Yet the renewable energy industry claims their turbines work at 28 to 30 per cent efficiency on average.  The Trust also found that for extended periods all the UK’s wind turbines linked to the National Grid muster less than 20 megawatts of energy at a given point, enough power for fewer than 7,000 households to boil their kettles.

My Take – Another stupid greenie promotion….and the greenies lie, but even if their lies weren’t lies……that still doesn’t generate the energy necessary for their society. These people have been so consistently wrong for so many decades it is mind boggling that anyone listens to them. We have lost our minds.

Arctic ozone levels in never-before-seen plunge
Long a consideration in the Antarctic, ozone levels in the Arctic are now a cause for concern. The ozone layer has seen unprecedented damage in the Arctic this winter due to cold weather in the upper atmosphere. By the end of March, 40% of the ozone in the stratosphere had been destroyed, against a previous record of 30%.  The ozone layer protects against skin cancer, but the gas is destroyed by reactions with industrial chemicals. These chemicals are restricted by the UN's Montreal Protocol, but they last so long in the atmosphere that damage is expected to continue for decades…

"That doesn't say much for the effectiveness of the ban on CFCs, does it? But it's nonsense anyway. The "hole" varies wildly from year to year. And if the present hole is unprecedented, that only means that records don't go back far enough. And guess what they are blaming the hole on now? COOLING! Ya gotta laugh." -John Ray

Here is more from John Ray - Did the ozone hole PRECEDE CFCs?

Brazilian geologist Geraldo Lino [geraldo@msia.org.br] draws attention to two old papers that show that the hole goes back a long way. The papers are:

R. Penndorf, “The annual variation of the amount of ozone over northern Norway”, Annales de géophysique, tome 6, fasc. 1, 1950, pp. 4-9.

P. Rigaud and B. Leroy, “Presumptive evidence for a low value of the total ozone content above Antarctica in September, 1958”, Annales Geophysicae, 1990, 8(11), pp. 791-94.)

Lino says:  Both papers, one from 1950 and the other from 1990, suggest that such extreme rarefactions of the stratospheric ozone concentrations (below 150 dobson units) that became later known as the "ozone hole" were quite common over Northern Norway and also Antarctica, even before the CFCs were largely used (or invented, in the Norwegian case, inasmuch as the measurements there started three years before the invention of the CFCs by Thomas Midgley in 1929).

One of the authors, American meteorologist Randolph Penndorf, even uses the term "holes" to explain such low ozone readings. For me it's enough evidence that this is another natural phenomenon.

My Take - Does anyone know what ozone is? It is an O3 molecule that is created by the sun’s rays crashing into the oxygen molecules of the Earth’s atmosphere, and fortunately it has a relatively short half life because it is being created by this process all the time.

So how then can there be too little or too much? The amount of ozone is directly related to sunlight and oxygen. If we ever run out of oxygen or sunlight, or if for some reason the half life of ozone changes ….then we have a problem. Is there any reason to believe that CFC’s will change either of those scenarios? No! If not, we can never run out of ozone, and you have to ask; under these circumstances is there any reason to believe we can ever have too little or too much ozone? I would say no.

The reality of global warming and global cooling is related to the sun’s activity and doesn’t have a thing to do with CO2. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find that the ozone level is also related to that activity and doesn’t have a thing to do with CFC’s, and these shifting levels is within the natural margins?