Posts by Farmer Green
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Hard News: When the drug warriors turn, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Thanks for the correction : propylhexedrine it was.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Gidday Chris, I just happened to go back here to look for my "ID".
It's very interesting because there are a number of threads in this developing situation, and the farming papers are still debating it.
The science is being clarified, and the apologists are out in force - "we were doing it to save the planet".
Now that N2O emissions from agriculture , and CAGW in general are effectively "dead ducks ", that excuse is going nowhere.
Which brings us back to the fact that the problem was nitrate loss to groundwater from urine patches as a consequence of the grazing management employed during late winter/early spring i.e. concentrated mob -stocking ("controlled starvation "if you like ) on cold wet soils.
The fact remains that very few farmers were using DCD, and their reasons for doing so may have been largely economic. Certainly , it was not necessary to use it; most didn't.
And it ended up in the product. Again the apologists , notably Jacqueline Rowarth , pointed out that it was not poisonous.
Red herring! It was contamination.
Clean , green and fresh. Yeah right!
Contaminated , arguably unsustainable, storable commodity! -
" there still needs to be developed an angle which takes into account the actual positive reasons that people might want to do drugs."
Perhaps the starting point should be recognition that ALL substances have a use and an abuse ; indeed , anything can be used or abused.
That leads immediately to the prime suspect - drug "education".The issue is the children isn't it? Adults can make their own decisions, and wear the consequences.
Kids are taught that all "drug" use is abuse, and one toke will lead you to hell.
Anyone with an half an ounce (sic) of sense immediately realises that this is a lie.
So what other drugs have they lied about? Well , most of them actually( designer drugs might be the exception since little is known about them).
The end result is people with alcohol and P habits.Even alcohol, cocaine and heroin have their uses, cf the well-researched Brompton cocktail. Anyone remember the little benzedrine nasal inhalers that were used in the 50s and 60s?
Heroin is very useful in certain painful terminal cancers.Bottom line; don't bullshit the kids.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to David Hood,
This is a more eloquent statement of FG’s current position. Call it anything you like ; it is a widely held view.
If you must label it , in order to deny it, then call it
A Creed for the Third Millenium (apologies to colleen mccullough)“In a century, we probably will be able to make quantitative climate predictions with some skill. In the current decade, we cannot.
AGW is by no means disproven by the last 15 to 18 years of arguably flat temperatures, just as it was by no means proven by the temperature rise that occurred during the ENSO event or since the end of the LIA or the Dalton minimum.
Temperature change cannot either prove or disprove the (C)AGW hypothesis, not without a full understanding of the climate system sufficient to predict what the temperature would be in the absence of extra CO_2, which we utterly lack.All the more so since we have to understand it in the presence or absence of CO_2, soot, various aerosols of anthropogenic or natural origin, with a variable sun, varying phases of decadal oscillations, and an unknown ocean sucking heat down or delivering heat up in a global circulation process with timescales ranging from years to centuries, with land use changes and pollutants in the waters that have visible global effects that we do not yet understand, all in a highly nonlinear chaotic system with numerous feedbacks and spontaneous self-organizing stabilizing macroscopic phenomena with global impact, on a planet that is inexorably pursing an orbital cycle that completely changes the underlying “equilibrium” over time in ways we do not fully understand and cannot predict or compute.
In the meantime, prudence suggests that we concentrate on the ongoing disaster of global energy poverty first as it is a certain disaster that is happening now and forces 1/3 of the world’s population to live in near prehistoric levels of poverty and misery.
Even if CO_2 were precisely as disastrous as the worst-case CAGW scenarios suggest — which few people believe any more, including climate scientists — the impact of a 2.5-3.5 C rise in global temperature by the end of the century will be smaller than the impact of a century more of global energy poverty, even if the ocean does rise a full meter or more, even if storms do actually get discernibly worse eventually, even if there is increased desertification, none of which are currently observible.Somewhere in the world, as I type this, not one but hundreds of millions of people are cooking a sparse day’s meal on animal dung or a small charcoal fire. Their children are breathing in particulates and smoke and suffering from malnutrition and diseases.
Their clothes must be hand washed, if they are washed at all.
They have neither fresh, clean water nor anything but the great outdoors as a sewer system.
Some two billion people will light their homes — if one can call a tin shanty or mud or grass hut a home — with an oil lamp or nothing at all tonight. The children of those two billion people will not go to school tomorrow, cannot read or do simple arithmetic, and will go to bed hungry (indeed, live always hungry, as they do not take in enough food to support their growth).
They will grow up stunted in stature and damaged in their brains, all because they lack access to cheap electricity, running clean water and sewer facilities and clothes washing and refrigeration and schools and houses and adequate supplies of fertilizer-grown food that electricity enables.
Many will die young, or live to become “criminals” as they do what they must to stay alive, or will become cannon fodder for anyone who promises to give them a better life if they will fight and die for them.They, not the threat of a supposed apocalypse that might or might not happen in a century, are the moral imperative of the twenty-first century.
There is no need for 1/3 of the world’s population to live in squalid misery — not any more.
We have the technology, we have the wealth, to utterly eliminate global poverty within a few decades.
What we lack is the will and the vision to do so.And we will never succeed in doing so at the same time we make energy more expensive and discourage its use.
The poverty in question is energy poverty. Fundamentally.
With enough, cheap enough, energy, we can make the deserts bloom, create jobs in the heart of Africa or India or South America, bring medicine and electric lights and running water to the world.
Cheap, clean energy solves all problems; it is the fundamental scarcity.” -
Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to David Hood,
actually 2012 was the warmest.
Here is James Hansen’s latest summation. Who to believe?
“The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing. ” – James Hansen et al.
Jim Hansen et al. have written a remarkable document titled Global Temperature Update Through 2012. Excerpts:“An update through 2012 of our global analysis reveals 2012 as having practically the same temperature as 2011, significantly lower than the maximum reached in 2010. These short-term global fluctuations are associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the figure. 2012 is nominally the 9th warmest year, but it is indistinguishable in rank with several other years, as shown by the error estimate for comparing nearby years. Note that the 10 warmest years in the record all occurred since 1998.
The current stand-still of the 5-year running mean global temperature may be largely a consequence of the fact that the first half of the past 10 years had predominantly El Nino conditions, and the second half had predominantly La Nina conditions.”
Farmer Green’s understanding does not seem , in the light of the above, to be so deviant.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to David Hood,
FG’s bemusement and dissatisfaction with the thrust of “environmentalism” is that he holds the view that one of the most practical and profitable ways of dealing with soil and water issues , viz nutrient and water holding capacity, is to increase the carbon content and depth of topsoil. There seems to be adequate science to support the view that an increased depth of a more carbonaceous topsoil will not only be more productive, resilient, and more friable(less fuel required for cultivation), but it will require less irrigation and it will lose less fertiliser elements(N) to groundwater.
More food , less pollution and more atmospheric CO2 sequestered (if that matters).
Hence his view that we should obsesss a little more about soil conservation, and we would achieve reductions in atmospheric CO2 as a byproduct.
It’s hard to see why that is not the best course of action. The focus on climate appears to have been to the detriment of a goal which would have had a more beneficial outcome in total (assuming that reduced atmospheric CO2 is desirable).
It is clear now that little or nothing will be done about climate per se, but the soil and water goals appear pressing. Will they go the same way?Is it time for the environmental movement in Godzone(if such a thing exists) to get real about what it can achieve, and accept that it might get more than one possibly desirable outcome by focussing on the most immediate and proximate problem?
Think global: act local, right? -
FG thinks that most will not have noticed the errors which, it is presumed, you have drawn to the publication’s editors.
The point is that “environmentalists ” are increasingly being accused of crying wolf e.g Manawatu River one of the world’s most polluted, at the same time as little is being done to reverse the demonstrable degradation of the environment.
Perhaps there is no connection between these two observations ; there may be other reasons why apathy prevails.
Suggestions here that there should be an end to the discharge of waste(treated or not) to waterways were met with denial that there is a problem. FG believes that the routine discharge of waste to waterways should end throughout NZ. If the discharged water is really so clean , then why not take it back and re-use it rather than drawing more from the reservoirs? Can ratepayers afford that?
Perhaps FG’s aspirations are too high ; very few farmers have done as FG did 30 years ago to address the soil and water issues .FG thinks that it matters little whether he is adjudged sufficiently sceptical in climate matters : climate is something that he works with every day, and change is the norm. Another 30 years of satellite data should see some certainty over the GCMs emerge. Validation may be possible by that time.
But if nothing changes in regard to soil and water conservation over the next 30 years, with a world population reaching 9-10 billion- well Hello Houston.
Are you optimistic? -
Here is another example of the exaggeration:
For example, the July 2012 SOTC report, issued in early August, announced that a new record had been set with the average July temperature for the contiguous United States at 77.6 degrees, one-fifth of a degree higher than in July 1936. However, the NCDC now says the July 2012 average was actually about 76.9 degrees, nearly 0.7 degrees less. This is almost 0.5 degrees cooler than the 77.4 degrees claimed as the previous monthly record in 1936. What is going on?
It turns out that the NCDC does not wait for all the data to be received before computing and very publicly announcing the U.S. average temperature and its rank compared to other months and years. While some stations, such as those at airports, send the data quickly via radio links and the Internet, other stations use old paper forms that arrive by mail considerably later.
When the printed data finally arrive, the NCDC updates its temperature database, typically “cooling” the country when all the data are used.
Neither the NCDC nor NOAA tells the public and the press that the temperature announcements in previous SOTCs are no longer correct when the complete data set is analyzed.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/11/2012-probably-not-the-hottest-on-record-after-all/#ixzz2I54t5msB
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter -
Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to David Hood,
Now there is debate about the exact, precise rate of warming- some of the detail about the exact finer detail of the relationship between climate and weather, and the exact, precise rate at which atmospheric carbon is acidifying the oceans,
That seems to Farmer Green to be entirely proper; certainly it is important to establish the degree of change to be expected, and to make policy changes as required by the degree of risk that is presented.
One must ask also whether the hysterical alarmist approach (such as the infamous NZ Listener cover depicting an incinerating planet) has been efficacious in bringing about enhanced environmental protection , let alone restoration.
It seems to farmer green that the Rio Earth Summit and the Kyoto protocols have been spectacular failures in halting over-exploitation of the environment, so was blatant exaggeration and hysteria a good way to go?
This matters because it appears to FG that the problems have barely begun to be addressed, even the most obvious and proximate ones of water degradation, topsoil loss and contamination , and waste disposal.Is an alternative "PR" strategy now requiring to be considered?
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Sacha,
It’s a reasonable bet that there will be another 15 years or so of this :-)
Seriously we have far too short a period of good data from which to validate the climate models.
But clearly something is going on . If the media is getting it wrong then we can expect corrections to be published in short order. Perhaps not.
Or is that what we are seeing?
It also raises the question of whether the media portrayal of the science has been wrong all along.The famous NZ Listener cover showing the planet Earth entirely in flames is a case in point. Absolutely hysterical unscientific nonsense.
Why would the Listener do that? Impresssionable minds and all that?It is also clear that uncertainty around the output of unvalidated computer models will continue for some time- until the models are accurately predicting observed reality. That will not happen overnight.
And a re-assessment of the basic physics incorporated into the GCMs continues .
What is fascinating, from a psychological point of view , or ethological if you like, is the way people on the extremes are behaving.
There has to be a decades worth of PhD s in this phenomenon.FG thinks that Bjorn Lomborg is on the money here:-
“But it does mean that we perhaps should not be quite as scared as some people might have been from the mid ’70s to about 2000, when temperatures rose dramatically, because they were probably at least partially rising dramatically because of natural variation, just like they are now stalling because of natural variation.”