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The Forum > Article Comments > The return of the hungry horses > Comments

The return of the hungry horses : Comments

By Viv Forbes, published 11/9/2015

We lived close to the self-sufficient sustainable life style that today's green zealots babble about. But life was no picnic.

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Ike Pope is as wrong about this topic as Stern and Garnaut, and has similar academic qualifications to them. He is certainly ignorant of climate, and believes the nonsense of failures like Hansen, who “ predicted that global temperature between 1988 and 1997 would rise by 0.45°C (Figure 1). Figure 2 compares this to the observed temperature changes from three independent sources. Ground-based temperatures from the IPCC show a rise of 0.11°C, or more than four times less than Hansen predicted. Lower atmosphere temperatures measured by ascending thermistors on weather balloons show a decline of 0.36°C and satellites measuring the same layer (our only truly global measure) showed a decline of 0.24°C.
The forecast made in 1988 was an astounding failure, and IPCC’s 1990 statement about the realistic nature of these projections was simply wrong”
http://www.cato.org/publications/congressional-testimony/kyoto-protocol-useless-appendage-irrelevant-treaty
Posted by Leo Lane, Saturday, 12 September 2015 3:08:15 PM
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Idiotic article! For decades the USA and Europe have been paying their farmers to produce far more than is needed, then dumping the surplus onto poor countries, devastating the agricultural industries in those countries. Now at last the subsidies are being directed in a way that doesn't do anywhere near as much economic damage. And it does result in a reduction in CO2 emissions, albeit only a slight one. It will also result in a reduction in emissions of carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

In Australia, and especially rural Queensland, it will result in a bigger reduction in CO2 emissions because more of the fuel will be manufactured locally. It won't resort in a shortage of anything, though there will be a slight price rise (good for farmers, bad for consumers, though probably too small to notice).

Claiming higher imported food prices in poor countries will lead to return of periodic famines shows an ignorance of the causes of famine; it's more a result of the failure of government than the failure of agriculture. And if anything, having farmers grow more crops that could easily be diverted to food use would reduce the chance of a severe food shortage.

Opposing the ethanol mandate is fair enough, but it's highly ignorant (or more likely, disingenuous) to claim it "threatens to take us back towards those hungry years before the kerosene-powered tractors arrived".
Posted by Aidan, Sunday, 13 September 2015 2:41:19 AM
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Hi Cobber,

So there hasn't been a hiatus, or even a slow-down, in the rise in temperatures since 1997 ?

So what has the rise been, roughly, more or less, ball-park ?

I'm not very enthusiastic about ethanol production, since it takes resources away from food production. On the other hand, I'm confident that if, say, basic infrastructure could be put into Africa, harnessing rivers, reticulated water supply, electrification, roads, rail, education systems, health systems, (and yes, manageable systems of loans) it could produce as much food as the world needs on its own.

Anyway, to get back to topic: taking sustainability and 'no impact on the Earth Mother' to a fairly logical conclusion, it's worth remembering that, pre-Agricultural and -Industrial Revolutions in Australia, Aboriginal populations numbered between half a million (in the best of times) and a hundred thousand (at the more common worst of times). People huddled around fires in winter, and scrounged for water in summer.

Economic and technological development is NOT a zero-sum game: advances in production techniques have been exponential, out-of-sight, in Australia since then - if it could be quantified, it may well be a thousand times greater now than in pre-European times. One could say that that is the differential between hunter-gatherer economies and modern economies, generally. A thousand times.

So 'sustainability' - if it is taken to that sort of extreme - would mean massive reductions in population, and in living standards, in Australia. Clearly, it would be a combination of insanity and idiocy to contemplate going back to that sort of society. But a correlation, which nobody wants to contemplate (it would be so politically incorrect), is that modern society - even for Indigenous people - is vastly more productive, more efficient, more innovative, than whatever came before. Thank god for cultural contact.

I hope the Goat Cheese Circle don't choke on their low-fat soy lattes and kale and quinoa salads over that this morning :)

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 13 September 2015 11:35:16 AM
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There are a number of ways ethanol can be produced. The main ones are from sugar cane, from corn and from cellulose material. Sugar cane returns some 8 times the energy put into making it, on the other hand corn returns about 1.3 according to some estimates. The Americans rely almost solely on corn whereas in Australia we use sugar cane as the feed stock. Cellulose is not widely used and the technology does not appear to be mature yet.

I agree that using corn to make ethanol is not in the best interest of people in general, but on the other-hand using sugar cane seems to me to be entirely sensible especial as there is an overabundance of sugar supply, and it would be good to see a lot less of it added to food and soft drinks.

Methane emissions from cows are not that serious provided they are grass fed rather than grain fed, but in any event are part of the natural carbon cycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel
Posted by warmair, Sunday, 13 September 2015 11:43:54 AM
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What utter garbage Warmy.

If that were true ethanol factories would be stand alone facilities, using only the fuel they produced to power their process, rather than being connected to the grid.

Why is it greenies talk such rubbish? Do they really expect to convince people? Oh wait a minute, I guess that is why they want to get their propaganda into schools, where their targets have little or no knowledge to refute their rubbish.
Posted by Hasbeen, Sunday, 13 September 2015 12:22:17 PM
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What utter garbage Hasbeen!

If the fuel the ethanol factories produce is more valuable than electricity, it makes sense to use electricity instead of that. But it won't make much difference to overall efficiency. Going off grid doesn't make economic sense now, and unless the grid companies persist with the current charging model which rips off electricity users, it never will.

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Loudmouth,
"So 'sustainability' - if it is taken to that sort of extreme - would mean massive reductions in population, and in living standards, in Australia."

Try to find out what sustainability actually means before telling us what you think its implications are!
Posted by Aidan, Sunday, 13 September 2015 12:49:54 PM
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