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09 February 2012, Thursday 20:10:59
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Håndbog For Skeptikere er en dansk oversættelse af den legendariske The Skeptic Handbook, som er skrevet og udgivet af den australske science reporter Joanne Nova. Håndbogen, som er i PDF format og kan nedhales her, giver en oversigt over grundlæggende fakta, som er tilstrækkelig til selv at kunne danne sig en saglig begrundet holdning til klimadebatten.
Who must prove?
Non-believers don’t have to prove anything. Skeptics are not asking the world for money or power. Believers need to explain their case. . . .Quote from JoNova
En mand forsøger at grave bilen ud af sneen i nærheden af Grove i Oklahoma den 10. februar 2011.
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| From Fog and Black to Clear and White with Coal and Wind |
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| Written by Karl J. Hansen, klimabedrag.dk |
| Sunday, 04 April 2010 18:59 |
 In the good old days, in the streets of London, a lot of scary things took place, even in the daytime, in the dark everlasting fog. Every novel describing people in the street do not escape mentioning this atmosphere of steam, fog, dirt and greyness. The good old days had it's downside regarding the big city environment. A clean building, back in the good old days, would be a new building and smoking cigars did not cause this unhealthy environment.I have never personally had the doubtful honour of living in a time and place like that, but apart from the literature, I saw the transformation from black to white when I first moved to Scotland in 1989. During my transit stay in Newcastle Upon Tyne, the thing that gave the deepest impression was the many buildings being high-pressure steam cleaned. The buildings went from literally black, featureless, dull and depressing cubicles into white, wonderful and impressive architecture, you felt like the city was rising from a ghost town to a prosperous metropolis. When I visited relatives in Copenhagen during my childhood in the fifties, you could still smell the rapidly vanishing smoky good old times. Lots of apartments still had not changed from coal and firewood. These fuels were cheap and new installations expensive. My grandmother used to start the wood burning kitchen stove about half past five in the morning. An hour later the stove would have heated the water for a simple morning toilette, then it was time to start the coal fired hearth stove and on cold winter days, the two fireplaces. The warm kitchen stove was now ready to cook the breakfast, the first four rings were removed under the frying pan to speed things up, you could see the flames rising when she lifted the pan. The kitchen stove had done the days deed at late night, before bedtime. There is something fascinating about about the good old days, but make no mistake, it was hard, monotone and for the less wealthy people, it was a relative short life with lots of pain and agony mixed in with a lot of happiness too. What I loved about my youth, was most people's enthusiasm, genuine love of nature, not just supporting WWF and Greenpeace, but they were a part of their local nature, living in it, of it and enjoying it. We, the young ones, played in the local forest, we walked with our parents ever so often on the unpaved forest roads. Please note that we walked, we wanted to inhale the surroundings, see the animals grassing and hunting, we did not run. Running in the free is a disaster for the animals, they regard you as being in hunting mode, so they must flee. With more and more people taking up this running habit in the forests, the animals are turned into nerve-wrecks.  How is London and other big cities now. They are very different in a good way. They are clean and bright, the fog is gone and the environment described in the Sherlock Holmes stories is difficult imagine today. Although the Londoners might still enjoy their antiquated fireplaces, most of them are now fuelled electrically and keeps the apartment at a fresh clean 21 degree Celsius. The electric kitchen stove is only producing heat when and where needed and you have ready-made warm water for morning toilette, the breakfast preparation is a matter of minutes, rather than hours and the thermostats have all taken care of controlling the fireplaces. When you go to work, you try to whistle one of Roger Whittaker's joyful tunes as you see the Sun on a clear sky between the many colourful houses, you can even smell the bakery at the corner some 100 meter further down the road. What happened to the all the firewood and coal, that created the hostile city environment in the past? The wood is now used for paper bags, furniture, building materials, etc. The coal is still used to draw energy from, but in electricity generating plants, where the ashes is used for road building, the dust is filtered by high voltage scrubbers and the minute pollutant remaining, is exhausted far away from the the city centres. The altered way of utilising the coal, produces a lot less CO and other unwanted gasses. Production of CO₂ stays largely the same, which ensures that we give back the ingredient needed for plant growth, thus keeping the environment green.Coal has gotten a bad reputation, a reputation it has had for many years. One of the reasons being that it was polluting our cities and was harmful to our health, you got dirty mining it, you got dirty using it; but it also brought us the energy that in the end increased our life expectancy, gave us more quality time, fuelled our industry that gave us almost everything we enjoy so much today. Coal is still, via electricity production, the main source of energy in our homes, industry, computers, cement factories and virtually most aspects of our lives. We still have coal in the ground and we need it until the day we have changed to new ways of producing the majority of our electricity. If it was not for the politicisation of electricity production, that has taken place over the last forty years, we would most likely not be dependent on coal much longer. We are trying hard to substitute coal with other kinds of production facilities, we are increasing the tax on energy on a yearly basis in order to transform our electricity production; but are we doing the maths and are we doing the right thing? Electricity production has to follow a tight schedule. There are variations over 24 hours, from week days to week-ends, from normal days to holidays, from cold weather to warm weather and so forth, but these are manageable variables that can be taken into account and prepared for. In all modern countries, you can depend on a stable delivery of high quality electricity, that is suitable to drive our lamps, heating systems, TV, computers, industrial machines, the elevators and really everything our civilisation builds on. The point is that we need to maintain the quality of the electricity, the production stability and reduce the price. When we accomplish this, we will have the surplus to care even more for the environment; without it, we fall into disregard as we so clearly saw in the former East-block countries, like Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), in Europe.  In China they have no alternative, but to use the cheap and well proven way of producing electricity, namely to use coal for electricity production. The country is big, the industry is exploding in terms of modernising and the living standard is becoming tolerable. They have huge resources of coal and can buy from Russia's large reserves too. This is fast making China a wealthy country with all it's benefits and few drawbacks. Traditional industrialised countries are selling the Chinese people alternatives to coal fired electricity plants, and they buy these products despite inefficiency, for the sake of goodwill and political correctness, they don't do it for the sake of substituting coal plants, it would be practically and theoretically impossible!It is the ingenuity, common sense and thrive towards best performance by the private industry, that has brought us the excellent electricity production facilities and infrastructure we enjoy today. The history shows that the same cannot be achieved in strictly socialistic countries. Therefore a political guardianship does not lead to improved electricity production, it rather hamper the development and is burdened with a Titanic unproductive overhead. We would improve the electricity production and distribution, and regain a development pace similar to the development of electronics, if we re-separated industry and politics; these are to animals that work very differently, they will only sidetrack and delay each other.  We have now had about 40 years of increasing sidetracking from political intervention. The main issue here is the so called "green alternative" production plants. These developments take place mostly due to governments intervention. It is very unlikely we would have seen any large scale building of wind turbines, if not for tax exemption, subsidies and special grants. Wind turbines have been honoured with labels like "taking few resources" and "being environmentally friendly". Nothing could be further from the truth. In the extreme numbers and sizes they are projected, they will transform the electricity production back, in a new path, to the days of smoky, stinking, foggy London. They will not disturb the cities though, but do relentless harm to the open landscape, coasts and nature. If the wind turbines would contribute to independence on coal, oil and gas, then you might accept the extinction of large birds, spoiled landscapes and the hundred fold increase in the use of concrete and steel; but so far wind turbines have not closed one single coal fired power plant, nor have they made electricity cheaper. Quite the opposite is the case, the wind turbines have created the need for fast reacting generators, like natural gas generators, in order to cope with the unreliable wind speeds.No doubt we all want to ensure stability and prosperity of all life on Earth, including the human race (most of us have a bit of self preservation left), but by focussing almost insanely narrowly on so called "green solutions" to the electricity production, we forget that the real world works the other way around. You first have to focus on the economy and then make adjustments to minimise pollution and environmental disturbance. You cannot create a sustainable solution by starting the design with respect to the impact and then make adjustment for the economy. Okay, one might have luck from time to time, but it is not a responsible way to develop the most important industry in the whole world. The politicians demanded the wind turbines due to the falsely claimed low resource consumption and in later years due to also falsely claimed less CO₂ production. They realised that this would not be financially liable, they "solved" this by huge subsidies drawn from the major electricity producers like coal and nuclear power plants. For both technical, practical and environmental reasons, the project wind turbines is not even a partly solution now and is unlikely ever to be. Coal is not a long term solution either. We certainly have to find new reliable ways of producing lots of clean and cheap electricity. We have dumped solutions from the 70's that could have contributed enormously to an ideal solution. However, one of these magnificent solutions was dumped due to decline in development funding after public scare campaign. The scare campaign that began then, is on the increase today. It's a few people and organisations with twisted minds, that has been very successful in issuing bogus scare campaigns and grossly exaggerated climate change prognoses, resulting in this strange contra productive development of our energy production. They have claimed they were the protectors of our planet, and not following their guidance to the letter, would lead to fatal destruction of life on the planet as we know it. It is impressive how the insane arrogance, the so called green lobby is showing, could ever make such an impact on the whole world's population. But with the society now so integrated into the green peoples misunderstood nature friendliness, there will probably pass many decades before we get both feet fully on the ground and begin to rescue the damages done to nature and economy. Everything is not all black and white, so hopefully the electricity industry will soon begin to look far into the future and realise that sacrificing long term stability and and making unnecessary impact on nature and resources, is not ideal. The producers should take back their power to do what they do best: Produce cheapest possible power, with the best possible guarantee for continuous supply and with the least possible impact on the landscape and the rest of the environment.
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