3-Nov-12 World View -- New charges on Barclays energy scam

[John]

3-Nov-12 World View -- New charges put Barclays at center of climate change financial scam

In historic shift, Mahmoud Abbas gives up 'right of return' for Palestinians

** 3-Nov-12 World View -- New charges put Barclays at center of climate change financial scam
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 03#e121103



Contents:
In historic shift, Mahmoud Abbas gives up 'right of return' for Palestinians
Arab public opinion turns dramatically against Iran
New charges put Barclays at center of climate change financial scam
Global warming unchanged since 1997


Keys:
Generational Dynamics, Mahmoud Abbas, right of return, Israel,
Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, Sami Abu Zuhri,
Qatar, Iran, Egypt, Barclays Bank, climate change,
Louis Redshaw, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
Enron, Mirant, George Bush, global warming, Antarctic

[Trevor]

It reminds me of the statement: "Don't bother me with the facts!"

They may be involved in an enormous scam, but they can get away with it not only because of the scientists who lie, but from the countless people who believe what they say and parrot their beliefs. Some have even adopted environmentalism as a de facto religion, meaning they'll never listen to anything that contradicts it. However, many of them are not deluded fanatics: they are ordinary people.

The only positive step with this is that there's growing skepticism of it. You're not going to be in a mood to sacrifice much if you're barely managing to make ends meet.

[OLD1953]

I've no problem with this statement:

Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.

But I've also no problem with the statement that 15 years is too short to determine anything about long term climate effects. I suppose that comes from early heavy grounding in astronomy, anything less than 1000 years on a global time scale seems too short to register as meaningful. Besides which, this picking and choosing of years is highly suspect to me. That's very similar to the claims that buy and hold always wins in the stock market, you just have to make sure you don't pick the times when it didn't work. And there are plenty of those.

There's always a hottest year in a given period, so it always gets "colder" from that point on. There's always a highest point for the DOW in a given period, so stocks have been dropping "forever" if you start with that year. Things aren't that simple in life. Cherry picking just doesn't give accurate results. I'm dead certain I can cherry pick over the data and "prove" whatever I want, and the results will be meaningless.

To recap my opinions on the subject, for those who have joined us recently, the evidence of long term warming is pretty clear. The explanations of what is causing this seem flawed, the estimates of long term effects are likely flawed and there's a helluva lot of unwarranted hysteria on the subject. And Al Gore is NOT a scientist, he has neither degrees nor other training in atmospherics. I consider it highly probable that either the human race will take control of climate before the end of this century or we'll have hammered ourselves into near extinction (not from climate caused warming) and in either case the whole mess is moot.

Even taking the worst of the worst serious scientific estimates of sea level rise, we get less than four feet by 2100. That's not something I can see as ending the human race. Moreover, I think the role of low altitude dark particulates is grossly underestimated, among other things.

Now, that said, I also think the atmosphere is not an infinite garbage sink. We do have to end this business of believeing the wind blowing away smoke gets rid of every issue. In the area where I live, at least half the public fishing waters are posted with "DO NOT EAT FISH CAUGHT IN THESE WATERS" because of mercury poisoning. The mercury is there because of burning coal with traces of mercury in the coal. We really can't continue down this path just because the public is more comfortable with doing things the way grandpa did them. Nuclear power is much cleaner per unit of power produced, and the waste is concentrated into a controllable lump, not spead out over five states. That the public fears this waste, and not the much greater waste from coal burning is simply irrational. Every release of radiation from storage tanks and pools can be laid at the door of this fear, controlling this material is NOT like trying to put the lid on Cthullu or some other mythic monster. It does not have to stay concentrated, just grind it up and mix with concrete into a big block, then pour three feet more concrete around the "hot" block to make a bigger block with a concrete radiation shield, put the whole thing into a shipping container and stack the darn things. It'll take quite a while to wear down three feet of concrete, and if we were logical (oh heaven forbid logic) we'd drop the blocks into the Marianas Trench and let them subduct into the mantle and go back where the uranium came from. Given several hundred millions of years before that material will appear on some mountaintop, I'm not going to worry about it.

[Trevor]

Let's not forget how they spread a panic when they say: "This is the hottest month on record!" The first problem with this statement is that it may not be true over the course of a month. The second is that even if it is, what they conveniently leave out is how long the records go back. Generally, it's no more than a few decades.

We didn't start monitoring the overall global temperature of the planet until the 1960's. Anything before that is nothing but an estimate. A year that's the hottest in 50 years actually doesn't mean that much. Even on the timeline of human history, 50 years is nothing. When you take geological time into perspective, it's not even a blip.

Nuclear power is a classic example of how politics can get in the way of technology. It's cheap, plentiful, efficient, but we haven't built any new plants in over 30 years. Environmentalists want clean air, but utterly refuse to entertain the notion of nuclear power. As for the waste... you're right about it being stored in a small area. What most don't realize is that it's possible to reuse it, to eliminate about 99 percent of the waste in those barrels through nuclear reprocessing. Well, we can do it; we're just not, thanks to political games.

I notice that any weird weather is evidence of global warming, or "Climate Change" as they now call it. More hurricanes than normal? Climate change! Fewer hurricanes than normal? Climate change! An unusually cold winter that broke countless records? Climate change! No matter what happens, the true believers and those who seek to profit from the scam can find a way to twist it around, unquestioned by most of the scientific community.

[OLD1953]

After Galileo invented (or copied, not getting into that here) the thermometer, temperature records started being kept. Data on marine temps is pretty through and goes back a long ways and if you want to help transcribe it, there's a place where you can do just that.

http://www.oldweather.org/why_scientists_need_you

Earlier temps are estimated from tree rings and rates and quantities of Carbon 14 in samples, and that's good for some thousands of years. Earlier data comes from such varied sources as ocean sediments and gas entrapment. These have an accuracy range, and honest papers will either give the ranges of data (usually graphically) or will refer to the original paper containing the data which should do so. A lot of the panicky stuff put out by the Al Gore types use only the highest range data. When I'm mentioning the subject here or anywhere, I either use the median or say "in the case of the extreme", which most "news" reporters and quite a few others do not.

My attitude towards "superstorms" and the rest of this is pretty much -meh-. You build a home within 20 miles of a coastline and also in a tidal area or one known to be a flood plain, I'm not crying for you when you lose everything. I would kick the zoning authorities in the pants a few times though, and it's a shame nobody does - THEY ARE THE PEOPLE WHO GET PAID TO PREVENT THIS STUFF. I've lived in flood prone areas my entire life and I have NEVER been flooded out. Why not? Because I'm not silly enough to buy a house in the bottoms. This isn't super duper hyperspace rocket science, it just barely makes the level of common sense.

Third and fourth generation nuclear power is amazing, the fuel is much more completely used up than in earlier generations of power plants.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html

[Raynote]

"This is a good time to repeat my expectation that in the coming Clash of Civilizations world war, Iran will be allied with India, Israel, Russia and the West, while the Sunni Arab countries will be allied with Pakistan and China."

Hi John,
This morning I was asking myself this question about the millions of muslims that live in Europe and particularly in France: what side will they be on in the Clash of Civilizations world war that's coming? Be they Africans, North-Africans or Turks...
Any idea or theory?
Thanks,
Raymonde

[John]

Dear Raymonde,

> This morning I was asking myself this question about the millions
> of muslims that live in Europe and particularly in France: what
> side will they be on in the Clash of Civilizations world war
> that's coming? Be they Africans, North-Africans or Turks... Any
> idea or theory?

Generally speaking, nationalism almost always trumps class, race
and religion in a generational crisis war with an external enemy.

Thus, America's Germans sided with the Americans during WW II. The
Japanese were interred, but they were still almost always loyal to
America.

Iraqi Sunnis and Shias united to fight against Iran during the
Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s.

Catholics throughout Europe supported the Spanish Armada attack in
1588 against the hated Protestant Queen Elizabeth. But the Catholics
of England supported the Queen, and a Catholic nobleman led the
English defense against the Armada.

If you have, say, people who migrated to France from Algeria decades
ago, who now have children and perhaps grandchildren, and even suppose
that those kids are protesting in the banlieues against the
government. That doesn't mean that when there's an external war, they
won't side with France. To the contrary, they'll want to preserve
what they have. They may consider their life in France as not always
ideal, but it's stable, and it's better than any alternative.
Remember that they could have gone back to Algeria at any time, but
they didn't because they like where they're living now.