Clouded reason

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Clouded reason

One of the most dangerous phenomena of modern times is how the irrational greenies have hijacked the environmental agenda and suborned it in pursuit of their own political aims. No better example of this is offered than in a piece by Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University in Adelaide, writing in The Australian.

Schwerdtfeger is reviewing the work of internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who asserts that the most awful consequence of the burning of carboniferous fuels is not the release of CO2 but the large-scale injection of minute particulate pollutants into the atmosphere. 

Detailed studies carried out by his research group have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall. Thus, humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2. 

What seems to be happening is that pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia. 

This and other work is now showing that the average precipitation on Mt Hua near Xi'an in central China has decreased by 20 percent, but rather than "climate change" this is attributable to man-made air pollution during the past 50 years. 

The precipitation loss was doubled on days that had the poorest visibility because of pollution particles in the air. This explains the widely observed trends of decrease in mountain precipitation relative to the rainfall in nearby densely populated lowlands, which until now had not been directly ascribed to air pollution. 

The work also shows the "frightening persistence and longevity of pollutant trails across vast areas", not least in the Australian Snowy Mountains catchments, where a phalanx of brown coal-burning power stations may have substantially wrecked the natural precipitation processes over the once hydrologically rich Australian Alps. 

If Rosenfeld's scientific interpretations are correct, then southern Australia would greatly benefit from the application of his discoveries. At the very least, Rosenfeld's conclusions should be accorded appropriate evaluation and testing by an unprejudiced panel of peers. 

The issue here is that targeted measures to limit specific pollution is a common good, and far from being objectionable, is economically as well as ecologically sound. And, by virtue of their very specificity, not only are such measures cheaper than the scatter-gun approach of trying to reduce CO2 measures, their effects are more immediately measurable and there is a true cost-benefit.

However, Schwerdtfeger remarks that the work has so far has been ignored in Australia (and elsewhere) because it does not fit in with the dominant paradigm that holds CO2 responsible for reduced rainfall in semi-arid regions. And thus do the greenies, far from improving the environment, hold back sensible measures and lock us into the tunnel vision of group obsession, perpetuating the very problems they purport to be solving.

Booker and I had a phrase for this ... "the sledgehammer to miss the nut". Perhaps we should take the sledgehammer to the nut(s).

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Kippered

Last week the prime minister returned from the European Council having denied the EU the right to determine which financial institutions he, or his successors, would have to bail out in the future.

Or so he says, and may even believe, notes Irwin Stelzer. But he hasn't. Stelzer continues:

In fact, France's Nicolas Sarkozy was closer to the truth when he proclaimed that "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism has been altered by the establishment of new pan-European regulatory bodies. Prepare yourself to learn new agency titles: the European Banking Authority; the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority; the European Securities and Markets Authority; the European Systemic Risks Councils. You couldn't make it up, as our tabloid cousins say.

These new agencies will not only provide jobs for the boys: they have binding powers to investigate and oversee cross-border banking, insurance, pensions and securities, and can issue binding orders to resolve disputes between member states.

Sarkozy has only scorn for Gordon Brown's claim that these bodies have very limited power. "We have agreed a European system of supervision with binding powers. My conviction is that its scope will increase."

History is on the French president's side – efforts to hold EU institutions to their original remits have uniformly failed. Surely, Lord Mandelson, a Europhile whose next project is the replacement of sterling with the euro, knows this.

Whether he shared that insight with his ostensible boss we do not know, but it is a reasonable guess that his Lordship neglected to warn the PM of the pending loss of still more national sovereignty. When the Prime Minister said that "candour" is the new watchword of his government, he surely did not expect it to apply to his new best friend.

The implications of this are profound. In the few short months following the banking crisis, we have ceded huge tranches of control over our financial institutions to the EU, vested in hostile hands with agendas which are entirely inimical to our own.

This has been matched by an almost complete absence of outrage and front-page coverage – part of the "opportunity cost" arising from the obsession with MPs' expenses. While the political classes have been discussing little else but the penny-ante sums involved, the EU has made a power grab that will cost us billions, all without reference to our own Parliament which has not yet debated the issue and never will.

That there should have been so little attention to this issue is unsurprising. Bankers, whatever their contribution to the economy, tend to be the lowest form of scum that inhabits the earth, and they have not made many friends recently.

Further, the whole issue of banking regulation is fiendishly complex, as we know from our own forays into this field. Then, apart from a few high-profile banking executives, the field is populated by anonymous, grey figures conducting back-room, technical deals which do not lend themselves to the "biff-bam" style of modern media reporting.

Thus, in the couloirs of Brussels and beyond, one of our most important wealth generating activities has been stitched-up, kippered and delivered to the enemy. We won't poinpoint the cause of the effects immediately – or at all. As the EU exerts its malign grip, its depredations will not be reported and that which escapes into the public domain will not be understood.

The only thing certain is that we will pay, directly and indirectly, and keep on paying ... until such time as we are forced to leave the EU or go bankrupt.

COMMENT THREAD

Repent at leisure

There is not much more that can be added by way of comment on Brown's plans to regulate parliament, beyond that offered by Charles Moore on 16 May, which we explored on this blog.

The Daily Telegraph leader has a go, noting that the proposals for cleaning up Westminster are a "demeaning moment for Parliament." It is an admission that those who are elected to run the nation's affairs cannot run their own.

This paper's main concern, though, is with the detail, particularly the controls over MPs with second jobs. The fear is that these will drive out high-quality people, or inhibit them from standing in the first place. There seems no concern about the principles embodied in the proposals.

For that, you have to go to a blogger, Raedwald, who calls it a "pernicious and malign Bill". In fine style, he declares:

The last thing this nation needs is an Act that would pack the chamber with vile apparatchiks and 'professional' politicians, rob the Commons of its authority, turn our parliament into just a department of government and treat our MPs - returned by us to Parliament to exercise the thunderous powers and sovereignty of that body - as mere hirelings, irrelevant juniors.

Such is the sagging morale of our MPs, and their slender grasp of constitutional and democratic principles, that they look to approving this with minimal debate and scrutiny, intent only on "restoring public confidence" in Parliament. Not for them the lesson of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the classic illustration of the principle that rushed law is always bad law.

As to The Telegraph's concerns about inhibiting high-quality people from standing for Parliament, the main deterrent is the singular fact that, progressively, this institution has been robbed of its powers (with the willing assent of its incumbents). Yet this Bill seeks to neuter Parliament even further, continuing its march towards irrelevance.

What is lost here is the very rationale for having Parliament in the first place. It does not belong to the MPs, or government. It is – or should be - ourParliament, there as a bastion against an over-powerful and oppressive executive. Anything that diminishes Parliament diminishes us.

Having lost the plot so long ago, however, our MPs are now conspiring in destroying what little authority they have left. But while they act in haste, we will be the ones to repent at leisure.

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