Reference: Texas needs migrants, Bangkok Post, August 30, 2007
I have no doubt that Governor Perry is right that Mexican migrants are an economic necessity in Texas. My personal experience is that they are an economic necessity in the California wine industry as well. Grape harvesting, vineyard management, and the great annual grape crush in the Napa and Sonoma wine regions of California are carried out almost exclusively by migrant labor from Mexico. The California wine industry in its current form and size cannot sustain itself without these hard working individuals. God bless them.
Cha-am Jamal
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Reference: To observe not interfere, Bangkok Post editorial, August 30, 2007
It would seem that all democratic countries would benefit from the practice of posting neutral foreign observers at elections. Guidelines would have to be set to minimize intrusive observation practices that may interfere with the election process. As well, one would expect that bilateral agreements or MOUs between nations to provide observers would work both ways with each party sending delegates to observe the other party's elections. The one-way MOU offered to Thailand by the EU is demeaning and insulting and it likely derives from a colonialism mentality.
Cha-am Jamal
It would seem that all democratic countries would benefit from the practice of posting neutral foreign observers at elections. Guidelines would have to be set to minimize intrusive observation practices that may interfere with the election process. As well, one would expect that bilateral agreements or MOUs between nations to provide observers would work both ways with each party sending delegates to observe the other party's elections. The one-way MOU offered to Thailand by the EU is demeaning and insulting and it likely derives from a colonialism mentality.
Cha-am Jamal
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Greenhouse gases killing corals
Reference: Study finds Pacific coral reefs dying faster than expected, Bangkok Post, August 28, 2007
The article cites a study to support the thesis that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are killing off the corals and endangering the ecosystems and economic value of coral reefs. The study in question is actually a survey of surveys. It aggregates data from 6,001 surveys of coral reefs that were made between 1968 and 2004. Each of these surveys provides data for a single reef taken at a single point in time and contains information on the percent of the reef surface that covered by live coral. Only about 10% of the surveys provides data for the same reef later in time and those data are heavily weighted by repeated studies of a handful of reefs. These data do not contain trend information for the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. The reported trend is not credible particularly when one has to pick and choose a time frame in which one can get the desired result. The chosen time frame happens to contain 1998 when El Nino is thought to have caused widespread damage to coral reefs in this region. Yet another limitation of this study is that it only reports a trend and it does not investigate the causes that may be responsible for the trend. This study does not support the article's thesis that greenhouse gases are killing off reef coral.
Cha-am Jamal
August, 2007
The article cites a study to support the thesis that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are killing off the corals and endangering the ecosystems and economic value of coral reefs. The study in question is actually a survey of surveys. It aggregates data from 6,001 surveys of coral reefs that were made between 1968 and 2004. Each of these surveys provides data for a single reef taken at a single point in time and contains information on the percent of the reef surface that covered by live coral. Only about 10% of the surveys provides data for the same reef later in time and those data are heavily weighted by repeated studies of a handful of reefs. These data do not contain trend information for the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. The reported trend is not credible particularly when one has to pick and choose a time frame in which one can get the desired result. The chosen time frame happens to contain 1998 when El Nino is thought to have caused widespread damage to coral reefs in this region. Yet another limitation of this study is that it only reports a trend and it does not investigate the causes that may be responsible for the trend. This study does not support the article's thesis that greenhouse gases are killing off reef coral.
Cha-am Jamal
August, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
From silent spring to global warming
The author of an article in the LA Times (June, 2005), a professor of public health, supports the global warming hypothesis by accusing the oil industry of manufacturing uncertainty, where there is none, by hiring scientists who are paid well to “throw mud and crank up the fog machinery”. He supports his argument by citing the case of the tobacco industry. These firms maliciously attempted to create uncertainty and controversy over the claim by scientists that cigarettes were addictive and that they caused lung cancer. In the end the scientists were proven right and the
tobacco industry was hit with lawsuits. The moral of the story is that scientists can be counted on to be right on public health issues and that we should simply trust them to be right on global warming as well. History does not support this view, however.
It was once scientific gospel that there was a cancer epidemic in America caused by trace amounts of synthetic industrial chemicals in the environment. The architects of this movement had specifically dismissed cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer. It turned out in the end that when the effects of smoking, longer life spans, and improvements in diagnostic methods were taken into account, the feared epidemic growth rate in cancer disappeared from the statistics. However, these statistical details were overlooked and the hypothesis became truth by virtue of momentum.
As another example of science gone wrong, consider the history of DDT. When DDT was first introduced, the advertising slogan of Dow Chemical was “Better living through chemistry” and the inventor of DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize because his invention had almost eradicated malaria and other insect borne diseases. America at that time was having a love affair with chemistry, X-rays, and all things new. However, the wanton overuse of DDT was shown to harm wildlife, in particular certain birds.
The book “Silent Spring” presented an Armageddon scenario with no birds to sing in spring because DDT had killed them off. This book was a watershed event in American history. It marks the beginning of the swing of the pendulum from irrational chemophilia all the way to irrational chemophobia. The media seized upon this book and it became a sensational best seller. It gave rise to environmental activism.
Much good resulted from it because the excessive use of synthetic chemicals, radioactivity, X-rays, and technology in general was checked. However, it left the extreme ideological legacy that human activity is bad by definition, that all things synthetic are bad, and all things natural are good even though most known carcinogens today are natural and not synthetic and although it is now acknowledged that the DDT ban in the hysterical aftermath of “Silent Spring” was an overreaction. Used properly DDT offers a net benefit to man and its total ban has made possible the resurgence of malaria.
Although the LA Times columnist does a good job of projecting the evils of the tobacco industry and the oil industry, he does not address the issue at hand. It is axiomatic that the oil industry will oppose a movement that faults its product for environmental catastrophe. That in itself is no reason to support the global warming hypothesis. It must be addressed on its own merit and not on the basis of the verdict on the tobacco industry and not simply by attacking the oil industry.
The earth has been warming since 1979 and we also have good data that atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in Hawaii has been going up since 1958. These data raise some important questions. Is the increase in CO2 the cause of rising temperatures? Is our use of fossil fuels the cause of the increase in CO2? Is it possible for human intervention to affect the course of climate change? No clear answers to these questions exist but the answers are apparently obvious to extreme Green followers of the “Silent Spring” revolution because they have now come to stand against all human activity.
It is therefore to be expected that they will find a way to blame human activity for global warming. As for throwing mud and cranking up fog machines, no one does it better than the Greens who are so convinced that they are right that they are not beyond bending the truth to scare the public. The usual method of their fog machine is to withhold vital information. For example, the claim that the West Antarctic Ice Shelf is melting and that it will raise sea levels by 4.9 meters, omits the information that at 0.25 mm per year it will take 19,600 years for the sea to rise by 4.9 meters and that the next ice age will surely have intervened long before then.
There was also the case of an atoll in the Pacific that was sinking due to subduction, as atolls often do, and the residents had to be evacuated. The global warming scientists seized upon this evacuation as evidence that fossil fuel emissions were causing sea levels to rise. Islanders were told not to speak of subduction but to go along with the global warming story as that would bring them financial rewards by way of compensation from CO2 emitting countries.
Scientists work under a lot of pressure to get funding for their research and to publish their papers. In their desperation and enthusiasm they sometimes go awry and they have been known to doctor the data so that they can reach the kind of conclusion that will ensure publication and continued funding. Scientists funded by the oil industry are more likely to push the industry agenda, as the author has noted. Likewise, we would expect that those funded by organizations that are pushing the Kyoto Protocol would tend to see things in that light. It is up to the informed public to come to their own conclusions.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
tobacco industry was hit with lawsuits. The moral of the story is that scientists can be counted on to be right on public health issues and that we should simply trust them to be right on global warming as well. History does not support this view, however.
It was once scientific gospel that there was a cancer epidemic in America caused by trace amounts of synthetic industrial chemicals in the environment. The architects of this movement had specifically dismissed cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer. It turned out in the end that when the effects of smoking, longer life spans, and improvements in diagnostic methods were taken into account, the feared epidemic growth rate in cancer disappeared from the statistics. However, these statistical details were overlooked and the hypothesis became truth by virtue of momentum.
As another example of science gone wrong, consider the history of DDT. When DDT was first introduced, the advertising slogan of Dow Chemical was “Better living through chemistry” and the inventor of DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize because his invention had almost eradicated malaria and other insect borne diseases. America at that time was having a love affair with chemistry, X-rays, and all things new. However, the wanton overuse of DDT was shown to harm wildlife, in particular certain birds.
The book “Silent Spring” presented an Armageddon scenario with no birds to sing in spring because DDT had killed them off. This book was a watershed event in American history. It marks the beginning of the swing of the pendulum from irrational chemophilia all the way to irrational chemophobia. The media seized upon this book and it became a sensational best seller. It gave rise to environmental activism.
Much good resulted from it because the excessive use of synthetic chemicals, radioactivity, X-rays, and technology in general was checked. However, it left the extreme ideological legacy that human activity is bad by definition, that all things synthetic are bad, and all things natural are good even though most known carcinogens today are natural and not synthetic and although it is now acknowledged that the DDT ban in the hysterical aftermath of “Silent Spring” was an overreaction. Used properly DDT offers a net benefit to man and its total ban has made possible the resurgence of malaria.
Although the LA Times columnist does a good job of projecting the evils of the tobacco industry and the oil industry, he does not address the issue at hand. It is axiomatic that the oil industry will oppose a movement that faults its product for environmental catastrophe. That in itself is no reason to support the global warming hypothesis. It must be addressed on its own merit and not on the basis of the verdict on the tobacco industry and not simply by attacking the oil industry.
The earth has been warming since 1979 and we also have good data that atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in Hawaii has been going up since 1958. These data raise some important questions. Is the increase in CO2 the cause of rising temperatures? Is our use of fossil fuels the cause of the increase in CO2? Is it possible for human intervention to affect the course of climate change? No clear answers to these questions exist but the answers are apparently obvious to extreme Green followers of the “Silent Spring” revolution because they have now come to stand against all human activity.
It is therefore to be expected that they will find a way to blame human activity for global warming. As for throwing mud and cranking up fog machines, no one does it better than the Greens who are so convinced that they are right that they are not beyond bending the truth to scare the public. The usual method of their fog machine is to withhold vital information. For example, the claim that the West Antarctic Ice Shelf is melting and that it will raise sea levels by 4.9 meters, omits the information that at 0.25 mm per year it will take 19,600 years for the sea to rise by 4.9 meters and that the next ice age will surely have intervened long before then.
There was also the case of an atoll in the Pacific that was sinking due to subduction, as atolls often do, and the residents had to be evacuated. The global warming scientists seized upon this evacuation as evidence that fossil fuel emissions were causing sea levels to rise. Islanders were told not to speak of subduction but to go along with the global warming story as that would bring them financial rewards by way of compensation from CO2 emitting countries.
Scientists work under a lot of pressure to get funding for their research and to publish their papers. In their desperation and enthusiasm they sometimes go awry and they have been known to doctor the data so that they can reach the kind of conclusion that will ensure publication and continued funding. Scientists funded by the oil industry are more likely to push the industry agenda, as the author has noted. Likewise, we would expect that those funded by organizations that are pushing the Kyoto Protocol would tend to see things in that light. It is up to the informed public to come to their own conclusions.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Ice core data
In respect the hypothesis that human activity causes global warming, the IPCC says that “the data are now clearly presented and have very high confidence intervals.” I would like to argue that the data are not clearly presented.
The IPCC climate model is based on an empirical correlation between atmospheric CO2 content and temperature that was derived from ice core data taken prior to the year 2000. These data have a temporal resolution of 1000 years and they do indeed show a strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature going back more than 600,000 years through many ice age and interglacial cycles.
In 2004, ice core data were taken again with improved methodology and finer temporal resolution and although they still show the same high positive correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, they also show that CO2 lags temperature by hundreds of years. That is to say, warming comes first and then the greenhouse gases. These data do not support the direction of causality assumed by IPCC and built into their climate model. The IPCC has chosen to ignore the new data.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
The IPCC climate model is based on an empirical correlation between atmospheric CO2 content and temperature that was derived from ice core data taken prior to the year 2000. These data have a temporal resolution of 1000 years and they do indeed show a strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature going back more than 600,000 years through many ice age and interglacial cycles.
In 2004, ice core data were taken again with improved methodology and finer temporal resolution and although they still show the same high positive correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, they also show that CO2 lags temperature by hundreds of years. That is to say, warming comes first and then the greenhouse gases. These data do not support the direction of causality assumed by IPCC and built into their climate model. The IPCC has chosen to ignore the new data.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Ayles Ice Island
Large chunks of ice have been breaking off and forming icebergs in the extreme latitudes ever since the current interglacial period began. Some of these icebergs are very large and some are called ice islands because they are relatively thin and flat. The break-off of the Ayles Ice Island from Ellesmere Island in August 2005 is part of this natural process. It is not unusual. It was not caused by human activity.
Press releases of this nature are part of an effort to promote the Kyoto Protocol and the Gore hypothesis. Global warming science is not an unbiased investigation but a zealous effort to promote an agenda based on the precept that human activity is bad by definition.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Press releases of this nature are part of an effort to promote the Kyoto Protocol and the Gore hypothesis. Global warming science is not an unbiased investigation but a zealous effort to promote an agenda based on the precept that human activity is bad by definition.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
The re-incarnation of fossil fuels
Life on earth is a mechanism that converts carbon dioxide to biological matter by absorbing solar energy. This means that the total amount of biomass on earth is an increasing function of time. We are a product of this process. The ocean acts as a reservoir of carbon dioxide and makes it possible for this process to continue. Additional carbon dioxide added into the carbon cycle of life by fossil fuels simply returns the fossils, that were once biomass, back to biomass. It is not possible for it to accumulate in the atmosphere. The carbon cycle cannot distinguish fossil fuel carbon dioxide from life’s carbon dioxide. Part of your body weight used to be fossil fuels.
The equilibrium level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is only a function of the solubility of carbon dioxide in ocean water and this amount reflects the equilibrium partial pressure of carbon dioxide on water at any given temperature. It follows that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide content are caused by changes in ocean temperature.
The Gore hypothesis of global warming assumes this causality in reverse. The ice core data going back 650,000 years that he cites to support his hypothesis does show a remarkable correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature but they also show that carbon dioxide lags temperature. This aspect of the data has not been widely disseminated.
The results of scientific studies on climate change that are being widely disseminated are products of a perverse research program. Funding for these studies is only available to researchers who support the Gore hypothesis. The mission of of such research is not to determine whether Mr Gore is correct but to accumulate further evidence that he is.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
The equilibrium level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is only a function of the solubility of carbon dioxide in ocean water and this amount reflects the equilibrium partial pressure of carbon dioxide on water at any given temperature. It follows that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide content are caused by changes in ocean temperature.
The Gore hypothesis of global warming assumes this causality in reverse. The ice core data going back 650,000 years that he cites to support his hypothesis does show a remarkable correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature but they also show that carbon dioxide lags temperature. This aspect of the data has not been widely disseminated.
The results of scientific studies on climate change that are being widely disseminated are products of a perverse research program. Funding for these studies is only available to researchers who support the Gore hypothesis. The mission of of such research is not to determine whether Mr Gore is correct but to accumulate further evidence that he is.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Greenhouse gases from fossil fuels causing droughts in Africa
Africa is a serious drought prone continent and has suffered numerous tragic droughts over the last 500 years. These droughts are natural occurrences. They are not caused by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. There is no trend in the severity of these droughts and the current one is not the most severe. African scholars have written to refute the IPCC’s effort to associate the current drought with their global warming agenda. One of these scholarly articles was recently published in the Bangkok Post. Also, the dropping of water levels in Lake Victoria and other lakes there is a known effect of a cascade of dams on the Nile and cannot in any way be related to the use of fossil fuels. The New York Times columnist who makes these alarming charges is the same individual who once fell for the oldest trick in Cambodian brothels and paid a large sum of money to “purchase freedom” for a young prostitute and then wrote a column about his heroic deed. This is the level of gullibility we are dealing with in this column as well. One should use a big dose of critical thinking when consuming this kind of information.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are causing the Himalayan Mountains to melt
The IPCC has cited the shrinking of the Chorabari Glacier in the eastern Himalayan Mountains as evidence that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels is causing global warming and that global warming in turn is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt. Although the data are insufficient and conflicting, they project that in a hundred years, the glacial loss will affect water supply to a vast region whose rivers get their water from these glaciers. With respect to the absence of sufficient data to support this projection, they propose the odd logic that “the dearth of scientific knowledge only adds to the alarm”.
There a thousand glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains. Some of them are retreating. Some of them are expanding. Some are doing neither. We don’t have sufficient data to know what most of them are doing except that there has been an historical retreat of the glaciers since 1850.
The Himalayans are folded mountains and the folding is currently in process. It is a geologically active area. There is a lot of geothermal activity in these mountains particularly in Uttaranchal where Chorabari Glacier is located. Steamy hot springs there are a major tourist attraction.
Neither the geothermal nor volcanic activity is included in the global climate model used by the IPCC. This computer model is the source of all their scary predictions that the end is near. The end may very well be near but the prediction of its coming would be more credible if their computer model included volcanic and geothermal activity both on land and in the bottom of the ocean. A computer model based on the assumption that all surface anomalies of the planet are due to human activity is not the appropriate tool for the determination of the role of human activity in climate phenomena.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
There a thousand glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains. Some of them are retreating. Some of them are expanding. Some are doing neither. We don’t have sufficient data to know what most of them are doing except that there has been an historical retreat of the glaciers since 1850.
The Himalayans are folded mountains and the folding is currently in process. It is a geologically active area. There is a lot of geothermal activity in these mountains particularly in Uttaranchal where Chorabari Glacier is located. Steamy hot springs there are a major tourist attraction.
Neither the geothermal nor volcanic activity is included in the global climate model used by the IPCC. This computer model is the source of all their scary predictions that the end is near. The end may very well be near but the prediction of its coming would be more credible if their computer model included volcanic and geothermal activity both on land and in the bottom of the ocean. A computer model based on the assumption that all surface anomalies of the planet are due to human activity is not the appropriate tool for the determination of the role of human activity in climate phenomena.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Greenhouse gases from fossil fuels causing Greenland to melt
Although there has been some thinning of coastal ice in Greenland, the total ice mass there is actually increasing because of a rapid increase in ice thickness at higher elevations. If we could cause all of Greenland's ice to melt into the sea, it would raise the sea level by 7 meters, as the scaremongers say, but that scenario does not appear likely given the data. One should also take note that during the last decade, Greenland has not become warmer. It has become colder. It is therefore not possible to ascribe changes in its ice mass to global warming or to greenhouse gases from fossil fuels. As a footnote, Greenland's coast was in fact green with vegetation in the tenth century when it was discovered by Nordic sailors. It was warmer then than it is now. It has not fully recovered from the Little Ice Age that occurred in the Middle Ages.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
August, 2007
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
August, 2007
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