Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment.

The Flat Earth Society: Still going strong.
Obama the spokesman, so what can go wrong?
All his “Carbon pollution”
is a Marxist collusion.
It’s food for the hungry, so let’s get along.

President Obama angrily blasted climate change skeptics during his energy policy speech Tuesday Jun 25 at Georgetown University, saying he lacked “patience for anyone who denies that this problem is real.”
“We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-Earth society,” Obama said. “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.”
O.K. I’ll bite. Who belongs to the true flat earth society?
Obama mentioned more than 20 times “Carbon pollution”. In his weekly radio address the following Saturday he mentioned it again, without specifying what he means by “carbon pollution”. He also likened it to Mercury and Arsenic pollution, so it must be very serious and dangerous in his mind. He did not specify if he meant carbon as in “soot” or carbon as in carbon dioxide, but he is not alone in not understanding the basics of Physics and Chemistry.
Earlier in his remarks, Obama said the “overwhelming judgment of science, of chemistry, of physics, and millions of measurements” put “to rest” questions about pollution affecting the environment.
I agree totally. Mercury and Arsenic are poisons pollutants. What about Carbon?
Mercury is bad, unless of course it is used in energy efficient light bulbs that can break and splat Mercury all over the nursery.
Arsenic is bad in large doses. The jury is still out if there is a safe minimum dose. There was a suggestion at one time by the EPA to go to 5ppb as a safe drinking level. That would have put much of Maryland drinking water in the forbidden zone. So they settled for 10 ppb.

“The planet is warming. Human activity is contributing to it,” Obama said.
Well is it?
It is a fact that thunderstorms are a stabilizer of temperature. Thermal thunderstorms can start when the temperature exceeds 76 degrees Fahrenheit. In areas with daily thunderstorms, like in the tropical doldrums temperatures rarely reach 90 degrees and average out around 88 degrees. In the desert where there are no thunderstorms it can get substantially hotter.

My daughter lives with her family in the Delhi area of India. My grandchildren go to a school without air conditioning. They stop school for seven weeks during May-June when the temperature frequently tops 115 degrees. Around Jul 1 the monsoon starts, and the temperature goes down to around 88 degrees and humid, but they can go back to school. This is the great thunderstorm temperature regulator. During the ice age the tropics were still tropical, so that temperature is fixed regardless of what happens elsewhere.
Not so around the poles. If rising CO2 should have a great effect on temperature we should notice it there first.
The best indicator we have is the ice that covers the poles. We have all seen stories like: “the Arctic ice will have melted away in just 5 years.” That was in 2007 when there was an unusually large summer melt. Since then the icepack has recovered somewhat, but in 2012 it did it again and melted even more than in 2007. Why is that? Is it “carbon pollution” like Obama claims?

(Note the maximum snow/ice cove over the North Pole is much larger than the Antarctic ice cover)

The level of CO2 has increased about 14% in the last 30 years and is roughly the same all around the globe. Since that is true, if CO2 causes large temperature increases around the poles the Antarctic ice shield should be shrinking. Is that so?
The Antarctic ice shield hit an all time record since measurements begun more than 30 years ago last year between Sep25 and Sep29. This year it is on pace to equal or exceed that record with about 500,000 square miles more ice than the 30 year average.

Why then is the Antarctic icecap growing and the Arctic ice cap shrinking? It is the same CO2 concentration in both places.

Something else must be the cause.
May I suggest carbon pollution and volcanic activity as two possible hypotheses.
This time carbon pollution is not CO2 as Obama defines it, but good, old fashioned soot.

While Obama is fighting a war on coal China is building one coal fired plant a week, burning mostly low grade lignite coal. China now burns 45% of all coal burned in the world. They are said to use scrubbers, but since scrubbing costs money they are often down for “service” The soot that is choking the people of Northern China (Remember the Olympics when they shut down most production for the duration of the events to reduce air pollution?) is going out as a brown cloud, following the Siberian coastline. Some of ir reaches the Arctic and deposits itself on the white new fallen snow. When the snow melts the following summer the soot comes back to the surface and causes a more rapid snow and ice melt. The speedup of the ice melt occurs at the time of the changing albedo, so that must be a large contributing factor.

Last year when the freeze cycle started again new ice accumulated at a record pace, so the ice pack may be largely gone in early September, but at that time the albedo change is of little consequence since the Sun is almost gone anyway. In the Arctic the winter Albedo comes mostly from snow over land, so that would be highly sensitive to soot. This pollution is partly manmade from unclean burning.

The other hypothesis is volcanic activity. The island of Svalbard lies near the 80th latitude and the Western part is mostly ice free all year. We learned in school it was due to the Gulf Stream transporting warm water from the Mexican Gulf all the way to the Barents Sea, which is the reason towns like Hammerfest in Norway are ice free all year. The northern part of the Gulf Stream is now called the North Atlantic Current, and it has been strong for a long time.

Most of the ice melt is due to melting from warm water underneath. But there is another reason it is so warm between Iceland and Svalbard. The North Atlantic Ridge between the Norwegian islands Jan Mayen and Svalbard is rising out of the Atlantic at a rate of 0.4 inches a year.

Some peaks are so high the depth is only 60 feet, and the next volcanic eruption can form a brand new volcanic island much like the island of Surtsey, south of Iceland was created some 40 years ago. This volcanic activity may account for about 30% of all volcanic activity in the world, but it occurs with very small earth quakes and is under water, so it has not attracted much attention. The heat up of the ocean is, however substantial and goes a long way to explain why Western Svalbard is Ice free, and why the whole ice cap is melting.
Of course since this ridge is rising out of the ocean, the water must be rising somewhere else, so it is not surprising the whole Eastern seaboard is slowly sinking into the Atlantic,
What is the conclusion? The Antarctic Ice cap is the best indicator we are in a cooling trend, and the increasing CO2 levels will help delay the start of the coming ice age.


(Not one day has the temperature been above average in the Arctic above 80 lat. since May 5 this year)
The rising CO2 levels has already made it possible to feed another billion people on earth, because increasing CO2 levels improves the photosynthesis in plants, increasing plant growth, so it is good for both flora and fauna.

In addition, an increased CO2 level makes photosynthesis more efficient over a larger temperature range, using less water in the process.
The earth is getting greener. A greener earth makes it more resilient to climate change, whether manmade or natural.
This cooling of the world is of course anathema to true flat earth believers like Obama.He is desperate too control CO2 emissions under the guidance of U.N. regardless of what goes on in nature. This is not to deny we have problems by manmade climate change. For example, cutting down the rain forests of Borneo to make biofuel is a really bad idea, but it is going on. To use corn to make alcohol may be even worse, nearly half of the weight of sugar is converted to CO2 during the fermentation process. To transport crude oil through a pipeline is far more efficient than transporting it via railroad, even if Warren Buffet owns the railroad. The energy used in mining the material used in batteries and motors exceeds the potential energy savings in Hybrid cars. Making electric cars charged from household electricity makes no sense as long as we generate electricity from coal. Wind power kills birds and bats, and when the wind does not blow you still need all the generation capacity. Solar energy is most efficient where it is not needed. The electric grid is overloaded and vulnerable to attack. Uranium based nuclear power generates waste products lasting for millennia
What to do?

Solar, wind and biofuel are but hairs on the energy chart.
One solution is converting electric power production from coal fired plants to thorium based nuclear power generators. There is an 800,000 years supply of thorium ready to be mined. Thorium based generators produce 0,01% as many waste products as uranium generators after 300 years. Thorium generators are scalable, cheaper to make and operate than all alternatives except coal and natural gas generators. They can be made inherently earthquake safe and in case of terrorism really easy to poison and be made unusable.
This is lacking in our energy debate.
Mr. President, we need an energy policy, not a war on coal and CO2 generation without a clue on how to solve our energy needs for the future. As Sarah Palin so succinctly put it: “We must be good stewards of all our God-given resources, for when they’re gone, they’re gone”