The threat to the environment that the green lobby tries to ignore
By Paul Homewood
h/t stewgreen
Andrew Montford writes in the Spectator:
It’s not like the green blob to keep quiet when there’s a threat to the environment in the offing. Even the smallest hint of a problem is usually enough to work a tree-hugger into a frenzy. So it’s worth taking a look at their decision to keep shtum over the recent appearance of what may be one of the greatest threats to the natural world we have seen.
Over the last few weeks, scientists and campaigners alike have been turning their attention to the question of how land can be used to tackle global warming. Their interest was prompted by the appearance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on how the increase in global temperatures might be kept below 1.5°C. One of the panel’s ideas was to propose a massive expansion of forestry, allowing excess carbon dioxide to be converted into wood. This wood could then be burnt to generate electricity, with the resulting carbon dioxide emissions captured and stored deep underground. The alternative is to use all this extra wood as building materials. This would, the theory goes, keep the carbon locked in. The IPCC paper was followed up by twin reports from the committee on climate change (CCC), the government’s advisers on climate policy. One of these papers was on the subject of biofuels; the other one was on land use. Like the IPCC, the CCC sees lots more forests and energy crops as the way forward.
But there is a problem with all these ideas, namely that if they ever came to fruition, they would do great harm to the natural world. The use of afforestation for carbon capture will necessarily involve chopping forests down on a regular basis and replanting with the fastest growing species; it’s fairly clear that few woods would be spared. The CCC talks obliquely about all the broadleaved woodlands in England that are not “actively managed” and appears to suggest that these could be sacrificed to Gaia. So forget beautiful, leafy oaks in Sherwood Forest and start thinking sitka spruce and willow monocultures.
It’s also worth remembering that, as well as wanting something like a quarter of the UK’s land area devoted to biofuels of one kind or another, the CCC makes the case for more wind turbines. They have apparently tried to obscure this inconvenient fact in their report by lumping windfarms and urban areas in a land category called ‘settlements’. But the worry is that up to 10,000 square kilometres of land – twice the area of the Cairngorms National Park – is potentially being earmarked as part of a wider rollout of wind industrialisation.
It’s fair to say that all this amounts to an ecological catastrophe in the planning. Yet there has not been a squeak from environmentalists in response. This is odd. Although ten years ago some greens were quite keen on biofuels – Friends of the Earth once wrote to the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, demanding that oil companies be compelled to blend biofuels into petrol – they fairly quickly realised that energy crops are not all they are cracked up to be. You might therefore have expected some sort of a reaction to the suggestion that nearly a quarter of the UK’s land area should be devoted to energy crops and that a further very large chunk should be industrialised. It’s not as if they haven’t noticed – Caroline Lucas of the Greens and Craig Bennett of Friends of the Earth both cited the IPCC report favourably. Bennett even said that it showed “huge additional action needed in next 12yrs to keep climate change to 1.5 degrees”.
The problem is that as soon as you start looking for solutions to possible climate change, it very quickly becomes obvious that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. Nevertheless, the green lobby needs to raise funds to keep itself in business. Talk of “huge additional action” can therefore be a good way to keep the money flowing in, just so long as there is a certain reticence about precisely what that action is. Expect the silence of the greens to continue.
Andrew Montford is deputy director at the Global Warming Policy Forum
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
If only there was a well-known phrase for the inconvenient truth.
No need to worry about chopping down all the big old trees, because most of the population will be bed-ridden with obesity and diabetes, following the banning of meat and dairy products, another key Planet Saving(TM) policy.
Many nutritionists now know about the disastrous anti-fat policy of recent decades, but the green and vegan zombies have cowed them to silence.
The only problem is that the IPCC did not take into account the space and water required to grow sufficient arable to replace more intensively farmed beef. They think that growing grain to feed to cattle when grass is in short supply is a problem for the planet along with the emissions of cattle, but just wait until you get diesel powered combines criss-crossing miles of arable prairie to replace that concentrated lump of protein on four legs.
While on the topic of forests, read the following piece of sense by a knowlegable scientist re-buffing the foolishness surrounding the Californian situation. Moonbeam Brown blaming the situation on CC.
Forests need to be managed properly and this requires long term investment. How much CO2 and particulates emissions from fires this year? California still selling the Ponzi scheme Carbon Credits.
https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/20/california-wildfires-global-warming/?utm_medium=push&utm_source=daily_caller&utm_campaign=push
The greens are a tad short of even the most basic critical thinking facilities, in fact I suspect a primary school child could critically analyse the problem and come up with the most obvious solution.
Burn coal/Oil/Gas for energy, clean the emissions (except for the wholly beneficial CO2) and leave trees to grow.
I very much doubt it would be possible to grow enough trees fast enough to satisfy the demand for energy required into the next 80 years of the 21st Century.
Indeed, I understand Scotland was predominantly forest until my forebears chopped them down and burned them before fossil fuels were commonly used.
The loggers of tropical forests the western world designates ‘illegal’ are merely responding to the demand of villages, towns and cities for timber to burn for heat and fuel because there is scant access to cheap, reliable electricity.
The greens are howling about the loss of tropical forests but are proposing we do precisely the same thing in the western world. No matter that we will move from having cheap reliable electricity to a state where it’s expensive and unreliable.
But the extent of their critical thinking goes only as far as dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Secondary school critical thinking would convince them it’s far more humane all round to elevate the lowest common denominator out of poverty by allowing them access to the means by which the western world accomplished it.
“Low resolution thinking” Jordan B. Peterson.
According to levend all the oaks in Fife were used to build James IV’s flagship the Great Michael. After Flodden this was given or zold to Crance.
At the bottom of most peat bogs in Scotland are well preserved tree stumps dating back about 4500 years which suffered when the climate changed and become colder and wetter. The tree stumps which I’ve known about for as long as i can remember are one ofvthe reasons i never bought into MMCC and allvthe other nonsense.
Good to see that the Indonesians are helping out on biofuels by felling and burning rainforst to plant palm oil trees for biodiesel. And even the WHO have a report on the damage of sub-sonic noise from windmills.
And when a forest has been harvested of its trees, who will replace the nutrients extracted from the soil?
cognog2
That’ll be the job of massive amounts of energy to produce fertiliser, best accomplished by burning fossil fuels as they have no impact whatsoever on the net result.
Burning trees to manufacture fertilisers to produce trees to burn, to produce fertiliser to grow trees……..You get my drift.
No such thing as perpetual motion.
The monoculture of palm oil trees and maize is on a mind-boggling scale and both crops are hugely damaging to the environment. But never mind, many people are making a fortune from the scam.
Leif Svalgaard sent me a link to a Dutton/Brune Penn State METEO 300 chapter.
They quite clearly assume that the 0.3 albedo would remain even if the atmosphere were gone or if the atmosphere were 100 % nitrogen.
This is just flat ridiculous.
Without the atmosphere or with 100% nitrogen there would be no liquid water or water vapor, no vegetation, no clouds, no snow, no ice, no oceans and no longer a 0.3 albedo.
The sans atmosphere albedo would be much as Nikolov and Kramm suggest, a lunarific 0.12.
And the w/o atmosphere earth would be hotter not colder, a direct refutation of the greenhouse effect theory.
Nick S.
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