Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

21 April 2009

EPA Fraud: Antarctic Ice Growing

The EPA has just ruled, as it was politically certain it would, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and they will regulate it as such. They will cause coal-fired electricity to become especially expensive and they will require still more stringent automotive fuel standards, raising the cost of our cars and putting us in ever more danger on the highways. This is being done primarily with the claim that the oceans will rise catastrophically if the American fossil fuel users do not make drastic cutbacks in fuel use. The fact that China, India, Brazil and other countries will continue to use ever more fuel will make any American cutbacks look very silly. Of course, it is silly to cut back fuel use and to make energy very expensive when there is no chance that the kind of catastrophic ocean level rise will occur for which the radical environmentalists are drooling.

Why not? First, there is at most a modest net loss of ice in Greenland. Second, 90% of the earth's ice is in Antarctica, along with 80% of its fresh water. While western Antarctica has suffered a loss of ice, eastern Antarctica is four times as large and much of it is getting colder. In fact, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research has issued a report saying the South Pole has had "significant cooling in recent decades." One wonders if this large cooling area was properly weighted into the claims that the earth was warming in the 1980s and until 1998.

The heavy calving of ice from the Wilkens Ice Shelf, is more than counterbalanced by the increase in ice in the Ross Sea area. The melting of sea ice has little effect on ocean levels anyway since the ice is already in the ocean. Land ice flowing into the ocean does have an effect, but the land ice in Antarctica is generally thickening. The worst case the SCAR report could envision was a rise of 1.25 meters by 2100, or only a quarter of the claims by some that up to 6 meters of rise might occur.

Last year, the ice near the Davis station of east Antarctica operated by Australia, had a fast ice thickness which at 1.89 meters was the thickest it had been in 10 years. The average thickness since the 1950s has been 1.67 meters.

The Geophysical Research Letters is about to publish a paper that will confirm that for 30 years the area of ice around the Antarctic continent has expanded.

So, where is the basis to be found for the EPA's declaration that the expected sea level rise will be a catastrophe requiring that the carbon dioxide we all breathe out and that plants must have to grow will have to be drastically reduced? It is not in science, it is not in the facts of reality. The basis is the need that socialists have to exercise more control over our personal lives. The basis is power lust. The basis is the change we can count on which will subjugate us all to the socialist elitists in the Obama administration and in the Democrat Congress.

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