Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[I_am_John_Galt]

 

[larry Strong]

Found this in the Red Deer Advocate

http://www.albertalocalnews.com/reddeeradvocate/opinion/Why_the_eco-doomsters_are_wrong.html

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings Provisions of the Copyright Act.(RSC)

Why the eco-doomsters are wrong
By David Seymour - Advocate news services - March 04, 2008    |    |      |    | 

This spring marks 10 years since the death of Julian Simon, the provocative thinker and a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, who refuted the notion that society would collapse as finite resources run out.

Simon reframed our thinking about sustainable resource use. Despite his premature death, Simon’s ideas continue to sort the real from the rhetorical in the environmental movement.

Popular thinking about humans’ relationship with the environment plays like a long-running version of Apocalypse Soon.

Fear of ecological catastrophe is almost as old as the Ark. The classic tale was Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, which was published and updated from 1798 to 1826, predicting starvation. Despite 28 years of dire predictions, the famine never came.

Since then, world population has exploded and life expectancy has grown, but disaster has not followed. Paul Ehrlich picked up the doomsayer baton in 1968 and predicted that resource shortages would create mass starvation by the 1980s. Jared Diamond’s Collapse is the latest manifestation of this long, myopic melodrama.

Disciples of spiritual and ecological apocalyptic thinking remain commonplace. Even now, a spiritual group in Russia is holed up in a cave waiting for the end of the world while exasperated officials attempt to coax them out. Thousands of concerned Canadians are promising to turn off their lights for an hour in March to show their commitment to making a smaller environmental impact.

A couple in Britain had a voluntary abortion and sterilization, so they will not have offspring who would use resources. More moderate disciples settle for training their children to recycle.

The underlying theme is the depressing notion that we are parasites on the planet, so we must choose between consuming nothing and destroying the Earth. For extreme advocates, sterilizing yourself is the only moral choice.

But Simon offers a fresh insight. Without its natural resources, the Earth is useless to us. Instead of worrying about how much copper, timber and oil is available, our concern should be the uses to which we can put available materials. Because our creativity is unlimited, there is no reason to expect we will ever run out of resources.

Simon famously challenged Ehrlich to name five metals that would be more expensive by 1990 than they were in 1980. As Simon predicted, the prices fell as we got better at refining the metals and found substitute materials for some of their uses, proving that our lifestyle is hostage to no basic material.

It is not difficult to find evidence of Simon’s thesis, even in our own pockets. Imagine, 20 years ago, demanding to listen to 600 songs plus the radio, take and store 3,000 photographs, calculate basic sums, be entertained by virtual games and talk to anyone on Earth from anywhere at the touch of a button.

One would require a long-playing record player with 40 12-inch records, a radio receiver, a camera and 90 or so rolls of film and a “pocket” calculator. A person would have to borrow something stupendous from the military for mobile communication.

It would cost thousands of dollars and would be much too bulky to carry. New technology is delivering all these features in a $200 cellphone that fits in your pocket, for much less money and through the consumption of fewer resources.

Who would have thought that a wafer of silicon (basically sand) injected with boron and phosphorous could store 16 billion digits, the equivalent of a backpack of film and records? Not only can we achieve the same utility with a fraction of the environmental impact, but we also do it with materials that were once considered useless.

Simon died an untimely death at 65. He did not benefit much from the growing life expectancy that has confounded Malthus, Ehrlich and other commentators of eco-doom. But Simon changed the environmental debate forever by refuting the finite-resource-and-inevitable-doom paradigm.

Through Simon’s influence, the environmental movement has shifted focus from worrying about running out of resources to worrying that we have so many resources we can change the climate. Simon’s ideas deserve to outlive him for generations.

David Seymour is the Saskatchewan Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, an independent think tank with offices in Winnipeg, Regina and Calgary. www.fcpp.org.

In 1980, Julian Simon bet Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb, that resource prices would fall by 1990. This chart (http://www.troymedia.com/NewsBeats/Environment_News_Beat/Images/Resources.jpg) updates the cost of the resources from 1990 to 2000.

David Seymour is Saskatchewan policy analyst for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

There is way to much money to be made selling and buying carbon credits, the people who will profit from this will keep the fear and myths alive, no matter how many people suffer because of it.

 

[vonGarvin]

Carbon Credits can be a lucrative business for sleazy people (such as me!).  I should apply for 1000 credits, and then sell them to some big company for $$$$$


(of course, the only thing that happens is that money changes hands: nothing productive is done)

 

[Haletown]

What's really happening in the great Global Warming Bait & Switch ponzi scheme

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill …All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome.
The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

- Club of Rome,
The First Global Revolution,
consultants to the UN.

“…we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination…. So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts…. Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.“
- Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology
lead Author of many IPCC reports

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
- Christine Stewart,
fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment

And from Maurice Strong - Mr. Kyoto himself

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, former Secretary General of UNEP


http://windfarms.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/global-warming-scam-of-the-century/

 

[a_majoor]

Coincidence, or.........?

http://www.mikebrockonline.com/blog/2008/03/the-sun-has-nothing-to-do-with.html

"The Sun Has Nothing to Do With Global Warming"
By
Mike Brock
on March 7, 2008 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)
Solar_Activity_Proxies.png
(Source: Wikipedia "Solar Variation")

The above image shows two indicators of solar activity.  The bottom line (in red) is the number of sunspots measured in a given year, and the blue line up top, is the magnetic variation of the sun, which corresponds to the changes in the solar wind.

Climate scientists have long held that changes in solar variation have a minor or unclear effect on Earth's climate.  For example: when NASA released temperature data on Mars, Jupiter and Triton, which showed similar average increases in temperature to Earth over the same 20 year period, it was chalked up to coincidence. Yes, the solar activity was related to warming of those planets, they said.  But not necessarily Earth warming.

Now, this year, we find that solar activity has abruptly fallen to one of the lowest levels ever seen.  There have been no recorded new sun spots since the end of the last solar cycle, and the new solar cycle just didn't "start" when expected.  This has led to regular articles in different science journals, with questions about whether or not we could be entering a Maunder-minimum-like cycle.

What makes this even more compelling is that so too have global temperatures collapsed (see chart) in the same period.  Is this just another solar coincidence? Or is it possible that CO2 levels are the bigger coincidence?

hadcrut-jan08.png
(Source: What's Up With That?)

The Maunder-minimum corresponds with what is sometimes referred to as the the Little Ice Age. It was a period of very low sunspot activity from the mid 1600s to the early 1700s that also, coincidentally, corresponded with abnormally low global temperatures.

Yet, when we take all of this data into account, climate scientists are of the conclusion that solar activity is only a minor component of climate change.

Here's what we know:

- Solar activity spiked in the 1900s, and continued upward into the 21st century, where record numbers of sunspots were recorded.  The record number of sunspots in the 1990s also corresponded with a very warm decade.
- When solar activity plummeted in the past 18 months, so too, has the global average temperature.
- When sunspot actvitity lulled in the mid 15th century, there was a Little Ice Age.

Yet, climate scientists want us to believe that solar activity is only one minor component of global temperature.  That, the warming trend in the 20th century had nothing to do with the warming of the Sun, and that it was principally anthropogenic.

I am not a scientist.  But it seems to me, since we get all of our atmospheric heating from the Sun, that the Sun would have everything to do with global temperature, and that variations in solar activity would have a lot to do with changes in climate. 

I guess that's just the naive little climate change skeptic in me talking, though.

 

[JBG]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050728.wwarming0728/BNStory/International/

"Global greenhouse gas emissions would have increased 41 per cent from 1990 to 2010 without the Kyoto Protocol, Mr. Downer said. With the accord, they are expected to go up by 40 per cent if all countries meet their targets, he claimed."

Billions spent in Canada alone to reduce the overall world increase by 1%?

It sounds like a waste and it is a waste. Climate moves in varying length cycles of varying intensities. Since we're coming out of an Ice Age the overall direction should be warming but with many irregular cooling intervals along the way. We're nowhere near the levels reached during the Medieval Optimum, the "Viking" period. The whole effort is to make work for statist beaurocrats with nothing better to do.

P.S.  The rest of the article deals with a new agreement being pushed by the EVIL United States to bring India and China into the effort.   ;D

This is just one of the many areas that the West is expected to be self-abnegating, huggy-huggy and acting in a "one-world" manner where no similar conduct is expected of the world's dictatorships such as China.

 

[a_majoor]

Although this is a post about the CWB, the idea that the government can mandate and manipulate the market is behind the shift to ethanol despite the rather abundant evidence that making ethanol is a net energy consumer and subsidies are wreaking havoc with the global food market.  When we see the self defeating policies of the CWB in action, we can forecast what will happen as the switch to subsidized ethanol takes place. Another fine example of regulatory failure:

http://climbingoutofthedark.blogspot.com/2008/03/think-beer.html

Think Beer.
Really, who can accuse the CWB of being sexy, and who cares about farmers. I mean really, they grow food, we eat it. Simple.

What if the barley growers switch to wheat, or corn because they can get better prices? Who cares?

Think beer.

Reaction to the CashPlus Program for Malting Barley Click on the interview with Greg Porozni, he basically states that other crops are looking good to him and other farmers.

You think the price of gas is high, think about what would happen if western barley farmers switched to canola. No barley, no beer.

Think of yourself as a farmer, I know it’s hard for you urban folks, but just imagine, its spring, time to determine what crop to plant, wheat, peas and canola are all higher than barley, what do you plant? The CWB has total control of the price you can get for barley, and they are offering a dollar less than Montana producers will get. Because of the “single desk” monopsony of the CWB, you have to sell your barley and wheat to them, but not canola. So what do you plant this spring? Think it won't impact you? Think again.

Wheat shortfall costing consumers more bread

Buying bread is starting to cost more dough these days. That's because the price of wheat has been steadily on the rise.

In developing countries, people are eating more of it, and farmers worldwide are growing less. Many of them are lured by high prices for crops like corn and sunflower that feed the growing demand for alternative fuels like Ethanol.

The result: wheat stockpiles are at a sixty-year low, and prices have never been higher. I just paid $3.50 for 12 hamburger buns, and it's going to get worse.

If the CWB is to survive, they must allow farmers choice or suffer from having no farmers planting either wheat or barley. What can the CWB do if that happens? What would they have to sell? Can they throw western farmers into jail for not planting wheat or barley?

It's time for the opposition MP's to free our western farmers! If they do not, if they vote against "choice" for western farmers, you better stock up on pasta, and beer, because they could stop producing wheat and barley, and start producing crops for ethanol fuel. Or maybe they will just produce potatoes, that should get Liberal MP Wayne Easter in a snit. The greenies will love more ethanol fuel, but we sure won't.

Think beer.

 

[Haletown]

good summary  . . .


When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story.

Today that's happening with the global warming cult.

"Human-caused global warming" has now officially been re-named "climate change" to explain the inconvenient truth that the winter of 2007-8 was the coldest in a century, in spite of all those tons of "greenhouse gas" being spewed into the air from all the new factories in China and India. Worldwide temps dropped 0.6 of a degree C in one year.  That may not sound like a lot, but it's more than all the ballyhooed warming in the preceding century.

If you want to see cult therapy at work, read John Tierney in The New York Times. Tierney is a skeptic who now conducts recovery therapy for the faithful on his Tierney Lab page. It looks like someone at the NYT has finally caught on to the hoax but won't admit it. So they hired Tierney to break it to the True Believers as gently as possible. Watch how the readers' blogs are resisting his gentle skepticism; it scares them. They are just Obama suckers who would have fallen for Bill Clinton, when he still had his magic mojo.

In the 1960s social psychologists studied a doomsday cult which made the big mistake of predicting the day of Armageddon.  When that day came and went without crisping the world, the cult leaders didn't admit they were wrong. Instead, they discovered reasons why doomsday had been postponed. It was a triumph of faith over facts. That's how stock market bubbles and busts work. It's how the jihadi Armageddon cult of Tehran will crumble, if we're all very lucky. "

rtr @      http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_epicycles_of_global_warmin.html

 

[TCBF]

...When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story. ...

- Like Gun Control?

;D

 

[Haletown]

  a nudder good one . . someone has a sense of humor.

"Effects of Global Warming Worse Than Feared

FALSE HOPE, NY – The effects of global warming are far worse than originally feared, according to a new report released Monday by the University of False Hope. Dr. Phil Raup conducted the research that showed, among other things, that the low temperatures for each day occur an hour later today than they did even as recently as last week.

“Low temperatures in the morning now occur, on average, an entire hour later in the day,” Raup explained. “This means that the day stays warmer for a longer period of time, thus putting our entire polar bear population at risk of falling through melting ice.”

Unlike other climate problems, this one can be unambiguously attributed to President Bush, Raup said. “This is a direct result of President Bush’s policies. If he hadn’t signed certain bills into effect, this aspect of Global Warming would have been delayed for at least three weeks.”

Raup says his research indicates that Global Warming caused a shift in the spacetime continuum early Sunday morning. In essence, an entire hour was deleted from existence. “The only explanation we found that is consistent with all research is that the extreme heat energy created by Global Warming caused a miniature black hole to appear, just for a moment. This black hole was powerful enough to suck time itself into its vortex.”

Raup credits ALGORE, a cyborg designed March 31, 1948 which later took the initiative in creating the internet, with keeping the black hole from causing more widespread damage. “The entire state of Arizona was spared thanks to ALGORE’s quick actions. Other than that, it was pretty much universal."

 

[Haletown]

interesting data froma reliable source - the Hadley centre is ++ pro global warming

This means that by volume , the upper half and much larger portion by volume of our atmosphere has cooled down much more than than lower part.


altitude (meters/feet)          hPa        Trend  (C/decade)
24,000/79,000                      30          -0.84
20,000/65,500                      50          -0.76
16,000/52,500                    100          -0.35
14,000/46,000                    150          -0.12
12,000/40,000                    200        -0.01
9,100/30,000                      300          0.10
6,500/21,500                        500          0.05
3,000/10,000                      700          0.06
1,500/5000                          850          0.08
zero (surface)                      1,000          0.13    (from HadCRU3)

As the data indicates, over the past two decades, temperatures have actually declined in the upper troposphere, even though there has been some minor upward trends in temperature at sea level and lower altitudes.  This completely contradicts conventional global warming models.


rtr @  http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2008/03/12/co2-global-warming/

 

[JBG]

If you want to see cult therapy at work, read John Tierney in The New York Times. Tierney is a skeptic who now conducts recovery therapy for the faithful on his Tierney Lab page. It looks like someone at the NYT has finally caught on to the hoax but won't admit it. So they hired Tierney to break it to the True Believers as gently as possible. Watch how the readers' blogs are resisting his gentle skepticism; it scares them. They are just Obama suckers who would have fallen for Bill Clinton, when he still had his magic mojo.

Link please? I'm very interested in watching how this plays out in the New York Times, which hits my driveway every morning but increasingly goes unread as it's become a boring rag almost as bad as the Toronto Star is reputed to be.

 

[JBG]

  a nudder good one . . someone has a sense of humor.

"Effects of Global Warming Worse Than Feared

That is  a good one. I sent it to my political mailing group.

 

[Haletown]

Link please?

Started here . . .

  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html

 

[Haletown]

This is a daily must check-in blog by a guy out of the US. 

He updates probably five - ten times a day . . .  Don't know where he finds the time but he does.



  http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/

 

[JBG]

Started here . . .

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html

Thanks.

 

[Flip]

I found this in the National Post.

Link

The media snowjob on global warming
Lorne Gunter, National Post 
Published: Monday, March 10, 2008

Ronaldo Schemidt, AFP, Getty ImagesAl Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, not a science award.
Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate

Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, -- not human sources are behind global warming.

The Washington Post's first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group's credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor -- the Heartland Institute -- received money from oil companies and health care corporations.

That's standard fare, and partly fair, so that's not what I am talking about.

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn't win the Physics Prize, for instance.

Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.

And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.

Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC's gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to "prove" that man is behind global warming -- not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.

The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.

There's nothing wrong with scrutinizing the motives of people engaged in a dicey debate. The subjectivity arises from scrutinizing only one side and always with a preconceived notion of what you are going to find.

Such bias is typical, though, of the climate debate, and not just among reporters and editors.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming:Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.

I wondered how come we don't hear about that in equal measure with the claims of an impending meltdown?

I received over 1,800 e-mails, most of them complimentary. A large number, though, were as hysterical and vicious as any I have received on any subject in almost two decades in journalism.

How could I not believe? Was I being dishonest or just stupid? How much had EXXON paid me? Until I could write in favour of the warming theorists, I should "go back into your oil company-funded bubble. You @*!/x-ing hack."

And that was from a climate scientist at a major university.

At last week's Manhattan climate conference, delegate after delegate related stories about how they had been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy of the Climate Change Pharisees. They spoke, too, of colleagues too afraid for their jobs even to turn up at the conference.

I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Another piece from Mar 4

More technical in nature - worth the read

 

[a_majoor]

Celebrating Earth Hour in Ottawa. Follow the link for the pictures:

http://www.stephentaylor.ca/archives/000977.html

Earth Hour

Earth Hour was 'celebrated' worldwide on Saturday in order to raise "awareness" of climate change and our wasteful consumption of energy. I was made aware of this event by the huge (approx) 50 ft full colour banner hanging from Ottawa city hall, the countless full colour flyers taped to lamp posts downtown, the wall to wall TV network coverage that has been burning up the microwaves, the buckets of black ink used to print clever 'lights out' themes on the front pages of newspapers produced from dead trees. Ironically, one Earth Hour promoter suggested sitting in the dark and burning candles instead of having the lights on. Alas, burning wax is a much less efficient method of producing light, and a process that produces more CO2, than using fluorescent (or even incandescent bulbs) that have been produced as a result of industrial progress, and market-based innovation. Indeed, the net result of industrialization was to create more efficient processes for achieving the same or better end results for less energy cost and less energy waste.

I live in downtown Ottawa. Besides a few lights off at Parliament Hill, there was no noticeable change in the electrical demand of our nation's capital. I wasn't up to too much of any consequence between 8 and 9pm last night so I decided to take a bit of an Earth Hour tour of the city from the comfort of a heated and fossil-fuel powered vehicle.

First stop was the Public Service Alliance of Canada building at 233 Gilmour st. This building is the Ottawa/federal hub for left-wing / labour / socialist causes as NDP associations and organizations close to the NDP have frequent use of board rooms and meeting spaces there. Here it is in its Earth Hour illuminated glory:

Not only were the lights on that illuminate the building on the ground floor and span half of the block flooding the grounds up until the sidewalk, a good number of offices were also lit up. These folks keep union hours (nobody's working at 8pm on Saturday night).

Next stop was the CBC on Queen st. It was a big night for CBC after all. Hockey Night in Canada is a Canadian institution and the CBC wasn't about to go dark for the occasion even though a lot of airtime was dedicated to raising 'awareness' for the event.

CBC Ottawa also did not go dark for Earth Hour. The building itself is within walking distance of where I work and live (it's also across from Hy's) so I have noted that CBC has frequently (if not every single night) kept the lights on during the night when nobody's working. Their empty cubicle farm located at street level is always lit up at any hour of the night when I walk by on the sidewalk. Sadly, Earth Hour was no exception.

I also high-tailed it up to Rockcliffe for a quick drive past Stornoway and 24 Sussex. The Liberal leader's official residence on Acacia ave was dark save for a small outside light and 24 Sussex had the lights on at the RCMP guard houses near the gate and a few lights on (generally for security one assumes).

How does one measure the success of Earth Hour? Are there any more people today that are 'aware' of climate change that weren't yesterday? These sorts of "global" events have been held in the past. Live Aid and Live8 were meant to raise "awareness" of African poverty. Unfortunately, Africa is still poor and we're just as aware of this. Live Earth was a global concert to raise awareness of global warming, but the concert itself had a considerable carbon footprint as celebrities and rock stars flew in on their private jets and arrived by chauffeured limo to tell us to install low flow shower heads and use less toilet paper.

These sorts of events are designed to make people feel good and think that they're part of a global solution to a collective problem. However, it seems that no concrete action is achieved by raising awareness on issues of which people are already well aware.
Posted by Stephen Taylor at March 30, 2008 03:17 AM

 

[a_majoor]

Here is the choice laid out in pretty stark terms; does India build a 4 GW powerplant  and provide electricity to millions of people or do we tell them they must suffer in the darkness? (Note in the article, India has a potential shortfall of 160 GW of electricity. Besides jumbo thermal generators like the one described, only hundreds of nuclear generating stations could handle the load with current technology).

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/money-for-indias-ultra-mega-coal-plants-approved/?ex=1208404800&en=fc1b35982cca425a&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Money for India’s ‘Ultra Mega’ Coal Plants Approved

By Andrew C. Revkin

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

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

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

As Michael Wines reported last year, the 700 million people of sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa have access to the same amount of electricity used by the 38 million people of Poland.

And the fastest-growing population on Earth is the middle class, which — whether in India or Indiana — revolves around access to electricity and mobility. (Tata Power is part of the same conglomerate that is poised to sell millions of $2,500 Nano sedans to the expanding Indian middle class.)

Here’s how the World Bank framed the issues in the I.F.C. news release on the $450 million loan for the Tata power project:

    etter access to energy services and higher energy use by developing countries are fundamental to the development goals of the Bank Group and our client countries. The Bank Group is working to balance these energy needs with concerns about climate change.

    Within this framework, I.F.C. is prioritizing investments in renewable energy around the world: it is tripling its renewable energy and energy efficiency investments over the next three years, supporting improvements in energy efficiency through financial intermediaries, and helping increase efficiencies in transmission and distribution. With fossil fuels likely to remain a key contributor to the world’s electricity needs, I.F.C. intends to support only highly efficient coal-fired projects, such as Tata Mundra, that have a relatively lower carbon footprint than existing coal plants.

    India faces power shortages that leave more than 400 million people without access to electricity, mainly in poor rural areas. The country needs to expand generation capacity by 160,000 megawatts over the next decade, and this new project helps address this gap.

Even as former Vice President Al Gore and NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen call for a freeze on new coal-plant construction in the United States unless the emissions can be captured, the reality of decades of coal burning is unfolding.

And, as we’ve written here repeatedly, experts say the world has barely begun to engage in the research and testing required to determine whether it’ll be possible to capture and bury carbon dioxide at the rate of billions of tons a year.

L. Hunter Lovins and others swear that India and China need not follow the Western norm of building prosperity on black rock and petroleum, noting the embedded subsidies in old energy habits and ample opportunities to curb energy use at a profit. But inertia appears to be their enemy. And how to blunt it remains an unanswered question. (Interpolation: what opportunities to curb energy use at a profit? These people have no access to energy right now)

Just one indicator of the direction of things is that coal-sales ticker over at the Web site of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company. It reels off sales at about 8 tons a second, by my estimate. As of 2 p.m. today Peabody had sold 65,246,061 tons so far this year.

Is all of this bad? If you’re one of many climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you’re a village kid in rural India looking for a light to read by, no.