Wednesday
Apr062011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The good news and the bad
Matt Ridley looks at a couple of recent papers. One of these notes that sea level rise is less than expected and that it is slowing not decelerating. The other looks at deaths caused by biofuel manufacture:
The production of biofuels may have led to at least 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost disability-adjusted life years in 2010. These estimates are conservative [and] exceed the World Health Organisation’s estimates of the toll of death and disease for global warming. Thus, policies to stimulate biofuel production, in part to reduce the alleged impacts of global warming on public health, particularly in developing countries, may actually have increased death and disease globally.
Reader Comments (18)
Yes, environmentalists with the ear of government are inviting us to join in their "great leap forward", with similar likely outcome.
slowing not decelerating?
Matt says: "sea level is rising more slowly than expected, and the rise is slowing down rather than speeding up".
I think the Bish meant "slowing not accelerating".
A spade is a blackman
Bioeugenics and Ecodeaths
As usual, Ridley sees things with clarity. A superb talk he gave at one of the Ted Talk things -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLHh9E5ilZ4
Pointman
P. J. Watson (2011) Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?. Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 27, Issue 2: pp. 368 – 377.
doi: 10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1
Abstract:
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1
Full text (html):
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/full/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1
Download full text (pdf):
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1
Doesn't surprise me. There's no trend in SLR at any of the supposedly 'threatened' islands monitored by the BOM SEAFRAME study either.
Including Tuvalu.
Anyone interested can take a look at the graphs for the four Australian long-term continuous tide-gauge records that form the basis of the study here (high res jpeg so use browser zoom for detail):
From Watson (2011):
Figure 4
BBD
Perhaps "especially Tuvalu" would be more to the point (at at least more pointed!).
From that excellent blog by Matt Ridley:
"Not far from where I live, there is a biofuel plant on Teesside, and to my disgust I find that some of the wheat grown on my farm goes there after it’s sold."
That is abominable!
Yes, we've been told many times that the corn planted to make ethanol is a species not meant for human consumption, so it ain't so bad ... but wheat, grown here in the British Isles most certainly is.
Then think about the energy costs going into raising wheat here, the fertiliser needed ... and this is then made into biofuel?
This is so sick, I'm speechless!
Mind - since the watermelons all say that there are too many humans anyway, I suppose they don't care about people starving to death because of biofuel. After all, they seem to prefer their 'saved' planet being populated only by themselves ...
"Mind - since the watermelons all say that there are too many humans anyway, I suppose they don't care about people starving to death because of biofuel. After all, they seem to prefer their 'saved' planet being populated only by themselves ..."
Apr 6, 2011 at 6:17 PM | Viv Evans
....and yet another right Charlie who posts on this blog.
Half-witted old cliches about 'watermelons', baseless generalisations about groups he/she doesn't like uniformly making deeply unpleasant claims.
In fact Viv's entire comment is deeply nasty and unintelligent.
Viv,
Any talk about maize (a.k.a. corn) varieties being 'unsuitable for human consumption' is green disinformation. The starch maize produces, which is broken down to glucose and then fermented to ethanol, is definitely edible. We have an interesting moral equivalence in biofuels here too where land is taken out of cereal production for growing willow or poplar for cofiring with fossil fuel - like they do at Didcot power station, for example - if you grow trees on cereal land you're not just losing one year's potential food crop but probably 20 years' worth, assuming the land is ever brought back into production.
Hey Zed, are you buying into County Hall's coal-fired car scheme? I see they're fantasising about leading the way in Treyew Road as usual. Shame they wouldn't have enough range to get to the incinerator at St Dennis and back in one charge - good for blocking the A30 at Chivvy Cross to annoy the emmets though, eh?
Meanwhile, Viv is on the nail, and you're just rude as usual. Maybe you should read up on the phenomenon of psychological projection - nasty and unintelligent would be a good starting point to consider.
SayNoToFearmongers, you said miles better than I could; she should never have let on she needs a passport to get to Plymouth.
Even if the type of grain used for biofuels is not fit/intended for human consumption, that does not answer the key point, namely that good agricultural farmland is being used for biofuel production on preference to and rather than providing food for human consumption. It is this (wasteful) use of land which is leading to hunger and deaths in rhe third world.
@ Viv Evans
Then think about the energy costs going into raising wheat here, the fertiliser needed ... and this is then made into biofuel?
It's actually even sillier than that. I'm not up to speed on the economics of corn ethanol, but those of biodiesel are pretty damning.
The yield of biodiesel per acre of oilseed rape is about half a tonne a year. The average British farm is 160 acres. Ergo the average yield of diesel is 80 tonnes a year. How much is that worth? Well, yesterday heating oil was worth about $1,025 a tonne. Add $25 to that for diesel. So the value of the avergae British farm's diesel crop would be a princely $84,000 a year, which is about £51,000.
That's a gross number, however. From that must be deducted the costs of fertiliser. You need to add sulphur to oilseed rape to make it grow. Ever since the ecofascists made refiners take it out of mineral fuel because they thought it caused acid rain, free sulphur no longer falls from the sky for nothing. Instead it is extracted from the fuel at the refinery, pelletised, bagged, driven to fertiliser plants, made into sulphuric-acid-based fertiliser, bagged, driven to farms, dissolved in water and manually sprayed onto the oilseed rape by diesel-powered farm vehicles. So no CO2 footprint there then!
Then there's the cost of crushing and purifying the rape to extract the diesel. Then it has to be shipped to where it's needed. And of course there's the cost of operating and insuring the farm vehicles and the stored product.
Deduct all those costs and it becomes clear that your average UK diesel farm would likely run at a substantial loss. But is this just a consequence of insufficient scale? Well, not really. The land area of the UK is about 66 million acres. About a quarter is land suitable for arable use. If every acre were turned over to growing diesel we'd still only produce about 8 million tonnes a year. UK consumption of diesel is about 15 million tonnes a year, of total road fuels about 30 million tonnes a year and UK total consumption of liquid fuels including non-road use is about 90 million tonnes a year.
It is abundantly clear that at no scale does biodiesel work. Without subsidy nobody can afford to grow it, and even they did, even if every conceivable acre were turned over to growing it, we'd still be between 50 and 90% short of the quantity we need.
What is needed is a country with enormous surplus arable land capacity, minimal population, and a global food surplus after taking into account the deduction from food production of all the diesel we're going to grow there instead of growing food.
The only places I can think of that fit the bill are Canada and Ukraine about three hundred years ago.
Maybe if northern latitudes warm up a bit, it will be possible to turn tundra over to agricultural use, and grow biodiesel in places like Siberia, the Yukon, and Labrador. What we'd need, ideally, would be a temperature rise in such higher latitudes of about four or five degrees over the next 30 to 50 years. Anyone have any ideas how we might accomplish that?
Zed
"and yet another right Charlie"
I think she may be a Charlene...
J4R
The Beeb's 'Costing the Earth' yesterday homed in on Solar PV. Everyone involved admitted freely that it wasn't worth doing without the FIT subsidy, and all expressed outrage that this was being reduced by a heartless government. One even suggested that oil and gas weren't taxed and that it wasn't fair!
Poor dears.