300 Global Warming Deniers  

The SMH had a bizarre hit job on Al Gore and global warming on the front page today, which originated from the murky bowels of the New York Times. As far as I can tell there is nothing new in here - just a few climate scientists having their caveats highlighted (minus all their positive reviews) and the usual fossil fueled freak show thrown in the mix. I guess someone at the NYT doesn't want to see a Gore presidency...

THE environmental campaigner Al Gore may have won over Hollywood with his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But the scientific world is proving a much tougher audience for his relentless campaign to raise public awareness of climate change.

There is a rising chorus of concern, extending even to "moderate" scientists with no political axe to grind, over the former US vice-president's tactics and advocacy. ...

Even a top adviser to Mr Gore, the environmental scientist James Hansen, admits the former vice-president's work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws". ...

Mr Gore, in an email exchange about the critics, said his work made "the most important and salient points" about climate change, if not "some nuances and distinctions" scientists might want. "The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger," he said, adding, "I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand."

Although Mr Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in An Inconvenient Truth. Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr Gore for "getting the message out", Dr Vranes questioned whether his presentations were "overselling our certainty about knowing the future".

"He's a very polarising figure in the science community," said Dr Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist and a colleague of Dr Vranes at the University of Colorado. "Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr Gore."

An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for best documentary and has taken more than $US46 million ($58.6 million) worldwide. Mr Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. "Unless we act boldly," he wrote, "our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes."

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James Hansen, Mr Gore's adviser, and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said: "Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees."

Still, Dr Hansen notes the imperfections. He points to hurricanes. Mr Gore highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will increase storm frequency and deadliness. Yet the past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the US.

"We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is," Dr Hansen said of Mr Gore. "On the other hand," he said, "he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporisation, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate."

Dave Roberts at Grist has a post titled "Debunking the NYT's sloppy hit piece on Gore".

Yesterday, Drudge breathlessly reported a coming "hit on Gore" from The New York Times. Today that hit has come, in the form of a state-of-the-art piece of slime from Bill Broad.

This may be the worst, sloppiest, most dishonest piece of reporting I've ever seen in the NYT. It's got all the hallmarks of a vintage Gore hit piece: half-truths, outright falsehoods, unsubstantiated quotes, and a heaping dose of innuendo. As usual with these things, unless you've been following the debate carefully, you'll be left with a false impression -- in this case, that scientists are divided over the accuracy of Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth.

I find it difficult to believe that Broad doesn't know exactly what he's doing here. (See RealClimate for a discussion of one of his previous travesties.)

I could go almost sentence by sentence, but let's just run through some of the highlights. I apologize for the length, but there's really a lot of trash here to shovel through.

Here's the central thrust: "... part of [Gore's] scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous."

All right, so let's see some exaggerated and erroneous claims, right?

Things start promisingly, as the article names one of these critics: Don J. Easterbrook, professor of geology. Easterbrook said, "there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing [from Gore], and we have to temper that with real data." What inaccuracies? Astoundingly, the article doesn't cite a single alleged inaccuracy until 28 paragraphs later. It's this:

[Easterbrook] hotly disputed Mr. Gore's claim that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this" threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

But Gore never said (as far as I know, no one has ever said) that the temperature swing in the last century is the widest temperature swing ever. Gore's point is that the global average temperature has never shifted so much so quickly -- about ten times faster than previous swings. That speed, after all, is the primary evidence of human involvement.

So we have exactly one "inaccuracy," and it's based on a thuddingly obvious misunderstanding.

Here's something else you never hear about Easterbrook in the piece: he doesn't believe human GHG emissions are causing current global warming. That's fine. More power to him. But it puts him way outside the scientific mainstream; the recent IPCC report put confidence in the culpability of human GHGs at between 90-99%. Does Easterbrook's ... idiosyncratic stance on the basic science of climate change not warrant a mention, since he is the critic most prominently featured? Apparently not.

Moving on. Many of Gore's critics, the piece says, "occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots."

Sound familiar? You just know what's coming next, right? Yup, brace yourselves for Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. ...

All right. That's enough. I doubt anybody's still reading.

For those who are, let's summarize: Bill Broad took to the pages of the paper of record to establish that there is significant concern in the scientific community about the accuracy of Gore's movie. To do so, he trotted out scientific outliers, non-scientists, and hacks with discredited arguments. In at least two cases (Pielke Jr. being a scientist and the NAS report contradicting Gore) he made gross factual errors. As for the rest, it's a classic case of journalistic "false balance" -- something I thought we were done with on global warming. I guess when it comes to Al Gore, the press still thinks it can get by on smear, suggestion, and innuendo.

Broad, and The New York Times, should be embarrassed.

RealClimate has criticised the propagandist behind the article before, and now get to do it again in "Broad Irony".

The first rule when criticizing popular science presentations for inaccuracies should be to double check any 'facts' you use. It is rather ironic then that William Broad's latest piece on Al Gore plays just as loose with them as he accuses Gore of doing.

We criticized William Broad previously (Broadly Misleading) for a piece that misrepresented the scientific understanding of the factors that drive climate change over millions of years, systematically understating the scientifically-established role of greenhouse gases, and over-stating the role of natural factors including those as speculative as cosmic rays (see our recent discussion here). In this piece, Broad attempts to discredit Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" by exaggerating the legitimate, but minor, criticisms of his treatment of the science by experts on climate science, and presenting specious or unsubstantiated criticisms by a small number of the usual, well-known contrarians who wouldn't agree even if Gore read aloud from the latest IPCC report.

Broad starts out by quoting Don Easterbrook (Western Washington University) with a statement,

there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.

Thrown in for good measure is a similarly poorly-supported quote by Kevin Vranes (who is referred to as a climatologist, but who now works on science policy) that

questioned whether his [Gore's] presentations were overselling our certainty about knowing the future.

Unfortunately, neither Easterbrook's inaccuracies nor Vranes oversold certainties are mentioned. We reviewed the movie ourselves, looking hard for such 'inaccuracies', and could only find one minor area (the explanation of the complex relationship between the global surface temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations over glacial/interglacial cycles) where justified criticism might be levied (and here, the accusation was only that Gore simplified a complicated relationship, something that is arguably unavoidable in a movie intended for mass popular consumption).

Broad then draws upon the same false dichotomy used previously which seems to equate the mainstream of scientific opinion (that global warming and climate change is real, almost certainly in large part anthropogenic, and likely to lead to substantial and potentially deleterious changes in our environment if no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) with "alarmism", and places contrarians at the very fringe of scientific thinking on an equal footing with mainstream scientists. He goes on to trot out a number of the usual suspects, reciting the usual specious claims and half-truths.

Among the worst, is this one:

Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

This is dishonest in at least two different ways. First of all, Broad conveniently forgets to mention that the 2006 Hurricane season was accompanied by a moderate El Nino event. It is well known that El Nino events, such as the 2006 El Nino, tend to be associated with stronger westerly winds aloft in the tropical Atlantic, which is unfavorable for tropical cyclone development. The season nonetheless produced a greater than average number of named storms in the tropical Atlantic (10), 3 more than the typical El Nino year. But El Ninos come and go--more or less randomly--from year to year. The overall trend in named tropical Atlantic storms in recent decades is undeniably positive. We can have honest debates about the long-term data quality, but not if we start out by misrepresenting the data we do have, as Broad chooses to. Additionally, this is a clear misrepresentation of what Gore actually stated in his book. Gore indicated that it is primarily Hurricane intensities which scientists largely agree should be expected to increase in association with warming surface temperatures, and specifically notes that

There is less agreement among scientists about the relationship between the total number of hurricanes each year and global warming. ...

The UK Daily Telegraph has long been a favourite stomping ground for global warming denial, with the latest example being an article claiming global warming is good for polar bears (unfortunately not a topic any US based scientist can comment on any longer).

A survey of the animals' numbers in Canada's eastern Arctic has revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind's interference in the environment. In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today.

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears," said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals. His findings back the claims of Inuit hunters who have long claimed that they were seeing more bears. "Scientific knowledge has demonstrated that Inuit knowledge was right," said Mr Taylor.

While fellow scientists have accepted Mr Taylor's findings, critics point out that his study was commissioned by the Inuit-dominated government of Nunavit. Critics claim the government has an agenda to encourage polar bear hunting and keep the animals off the endangered species list. In small Inuit communities, hunters kill bears that wander too close to human settlements and, in this particular region, they are licensed to kill six polar bears a year.

Polar bear experts said that numbers had increased not because of climate change but due to the efforts of conservationists. The battle to ban the hunting of Harp seal pups has meant the seal population has soared - boosting the bears' food supply. At the same time, fewer seal hunters are around to hunt bears. "I don't think there is any question polar bears are in danger from global warming," said Andrew Derocher of the World Conservation Union, and a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "People who deny that have a clear interest in hunting bears." Bear numbers on the west coast of Hudson's Bay had shrunk by 22 per cent over the past decade, he said.

"They are declining due to global warming and changes in when the ice freezes and melts in Hudson's Bay," he added. He and other scientists in his group are concerned that the retreating ice in the Arctic may pose a danger to future generations of polar bears because of 'habitat loss'. "The critical problem is the sea ice is changing. "We're looking ahead three generations, 30 to 50 years. "To say that bear populations are growing in one area now is irrelevant." ...

The state of Alaska yesterday questioned the scientific justification for proposals to add polar bears to the US endangered species list. Tina Cunnings, a biologist attached to the Alaskan government, questioned whether they needed sea ice to survive, saying they could adapt to hunt on land and find alternative food sources to seals. Prof Derocher said the theory was "absolutely fanciful".

The Independent is the Tele's (good) alter ego on matters environment related, and has an article on Channel 4's shameful contribution to the fossil fuel industry's anti-global warming disinformation blitz.

A Channel 4 documentary that claimed global warming is a swindle was itself flawed with major errors which seriously undermine the programme's credibility, according to an investigation by The Independent.

The Great Global Warming Swindle, was based on graphs that were distorted, mislabelled or just plain wrong. The graphs were nevertheless used to attack the credibility and honesty of climate scientists.

A graph central to the programme's thesis, purporting to show variations in global temperatures over the past century, claimed to show that global warming was not linked with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet the graph was not what it seemed. Other graphs used out-of-date information or data that was shown some years ago to be wrong. Yet the programme makers claimed the graphs demonstrated that orthodox climate science was a conspiratorial "lie" foisted on the public.

Channel 4 yesterday distanced itself from the programme, referring this newspaper's inquiries to a public relations consultant working on behalf of Wag TV, the production company behind the documentary.

Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the film, admitted yesterday that one of the graphs contained serious errors but he said they were corrected in time for the second transmission of the programme following inquiries by The Independent. Mr Durkin has already been criticised by one scientist who took part in the programme over alleged misrepresentation of his views on the climate.

The main arguments made in Mr Durkin's film were that climate change had little if anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide and that global warming can instead be linked directly with solar activity - sun spots.

One of the principal supports for his thesis came in the form of a graph labelled "World Temp - 120 years", which claimed to show rises and falls in average global temperatures between 1880 and 2000. Mr Durkin's film argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940 and that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, he said, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.

The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe. ...

The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

Other graphs used in the film contained known errors, notably the graph of sunspot activity. Mr Durkin used data on solar cycle lengths which were first published in 1991 despite a corrected version being available - but again the corrected version would not have supported his argument. Mr Durkin also used a schematic graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that was at least 16 years old, which gave the impression that today's temperatures are cooler than during the medieval warm period. If he had used a more recent, and widely available, composite graph it would have shown average temperatures far exceed the past 1,000 years.

Large local financial organisation National Australia Bank has declared it will become carbon neutral by 2010.

THE nation's largest bank, National Australia Bank, aims to cut the group's carbon emissions, reducing its greenhouse gas impact to zero by 2010.

NAB group chief executive officer John Stewart said that the bank would improve energy efficiency and use across its international operations and purchase offset carbon credits where emissions could not be avoided. "We'll identify a range of things we can do in each of the geographies that NAB group has a footprint in - Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Asia - and they'll be tailored to suit that particular environment," Mr Stewart said.

NAB's domestic operations are responsible for more than 90 per cent of the group's total greenhouse emissions and it will roll out several initiatives over the next three years to become carbon neutral by September 30, 2010.

NAB Australia chief executive officer Ahmed Fahour said the bank would buy hybrid cars to use in its fleet, reduce energy use in offices and branches and purchase up to 10 per cent green energy. Changing staff behaviour and using energy-efficient design in its office buildings were other focus areas. "NAB Australia is committed to reducing the impact of our operations on the environment and we'll be taking steps to improve our efficiency across the country," Mr Fahour said. "Any emissions that we can reduce or eliminate completely will be offset via offset credit purchases."

NAB joins a list of firms that have already taken the step to be carbon neutral. In December 2004 global banking group HSBC became the first big bank to announce its operations would become carbon neutral.

The Age has a report on Sweden's determination to free itself of fossil fuels (albeit in a way that may be overly dependent on biofuels).

SOME influential politicians appear dazzled by the nuclear option as the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By contrast, many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries have turned from nuclear to another option of base-load power that has been effectively ignored here.

Sweden, Finland, Austria, Britain and Germany, among others, are investing heavily in energy plants fuelled by woody waste, often mixed with flammable municipal waste.

Sweden, once a significant importer of Australian coal, has gone well along this path and is now generating about 20 per cent of its energy needs from woody biomass. This nation of about 8 million now has about a quarter of the Australian emissions of greenhouse gases per head, while maintaining a lifestyle most Australians would envy. Some cities and municipalities are as low as a sixth of Australia's per-head emissions, and aim to reduce them further. Many strategies Sweden uses can be readily introduced here, with the scope to rapidly and cost-effectively halve our greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

Why has Sweden adopted a policy to phase out its reliance on nuclear reactors and fossil fuels and switch to other energy sources? The answer is complex, involving its history, the well-managed forestry resource, and its political philosophy. It also is influenced by its recent experiences of the radiation fallout from Chernobyl, and the acid rains due to polluting Soviet heavy industry.

The country was hard hit by the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1976. It now has a stated aim of being independent of imported fossil fuels by 2030. Its cheapest domestically available fuels for energy generation are wood and peat. Since 1990, it has decommissioned two of its nine nuclear plants, and its policy is to eventually close them all, as energy production from renewable sources and more efficient energy use allows. Sweden's share of energy from biomass is now about 20 per cent, projected to rise to 40 per cent by 2025. While much of this is heat energy for households and industry, combined heat and power (CHP) plants of all sizes up to 500 megawatts throughout the country also put electricity into the national grid.

The city of Vaxjo, in central Sweden, claims the lowest per-head emissions in Sweden and the European Union, at 3.5 tonnes. The city aims to reduce this to about 2.4 tonnes by 2010. This compares with the EU overall at 11 tonnes and the US — with its many nuclear reactors — about 24 tonnes. To achieve this requires conversion of the city transport fleet to run on biofuels, encouraging greater use of biofuels by private car owners (the use of 85 per cent ethanol is doubling each year), organising more biofuel outlets at service stations, developing more bicycle paths and reducing household electricity use through increased efficiencies and awareness.

Kevin at Cryptogon seems to have joined the global warming skeptics as well, though I'm not sure (its a particularly erratic post) if he's a disbeliever in global warming itself or just in the political tactics being adopted by some politicians jumping on the bandwagon (ie. fear of the carbon dictatorship). Gordon Brown talking about a New World Order isn't helping matters...

A few of you just don’t want to accept that your most precious, deeply held religious beliefs were created by evil people to control you.

If you want to spout off like a deranged, Pentecostal snake handler, that’s fine with me, but if you’re still capable of critical thinking, spend a few minutes with these posts:

* Energy Scarcity vs. Cost of the War in Iraq
* Is Peak Oil a Faith Based Collapse Theory?
* All Electric Vehicles and the Concept of Enough
* A Fascist for Every Occasion

Or, maybe I’ve gotten it wrong and the diabolical Gordon Brown is our buddy and I should ask all British people to support the calls for a New World Order, various fart taxes, scheduled blackouts, states of emergency, national ID cards, etc. when all of this is mostly about a big, fat fascist lockdown so the elite can have total control over the raw materials (including potable water) that are left on the planet for themselves, while the rest of us are tracked, traced and surveilled 24 hours per day…

Via: Guardian:

Chancellor Gordon Brown is seeking to regain the initiative on the environment with a call for a “new world order” to combat climate change.

Ahead of the launch of the Government’s Climate Change Bill on Tuesday, the Chancellor will herald the Government’s role in new European emissions standards and call for the UN to prioritise the fight against global warming.

Crikey has an article wondering why all our money for addressing carbon emissions is being given to the fossil fuel industry.

Of the $410 million distributed from the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund (LETDF) thus far, $335 million has gone to the fossil fuel industry. No surprises there. As The Age reported on Tuesday, the majority of panel members have strong links to the fossil fuel industry. So here a a few ideas about how $335 million could be spent on renewables, water, or low-emission technologies that would benefit Australia today.

* $335m would buy 191 wind generators, which would power 152,800 homes and reduce greenhouse emissions by 2,139,000 tonnes per year.
* $335m would buy 890 new Toyota Prius' to replace the fossil fuel burning limos used by federal politicians.
* Biofuels create 60-95% less CO2 than fossil fuel based petrol products. $335m in subsidies for biofuels would both reduce Australia's reliance on imported fuel products and, for every litre burned, cut the CO2 emissions for a standard Australia car from 2.4kg per litre to around 0.5kg per litre.
Origin Energy and the ANU are researching sliver cell solar technology, which is aimed at vastly improving the amount of energy harvested from solar panels. The government has thus far invested only a few million dollars in Origin's research.
* $335m will buy 421,384 compact fluorescent light bulbs. Lighting comprises around 10% of annual energy use in the home. Depending on the wattage and other variables, fluorescent bulbs could cut that figure to about 2%.
* $335m will buy 507,575 flow restrictors from your local plumbing hardware store. Each restrictor could save up to 180,000 litres of water per year.
The Australian Greenhouse Office estimates that a laptop creates 40kgs of greenhouse gases every five hours of use. A desktop creates 200-400kgs. $335m in subsidies to purchasers of laptops would encourage more efficient energy use in the home/office/internet café/etc.

Government Senator Nick Minchin just can't help himself and is continuing to deny global warming is manmade, which I'm sure will be interesting to watch as the federal election looms closer - I suspect he'll be gagged at some point as the Rodent tries to put up a sane front for the punters.

A SENIOR Federal Government minister has expressed serious doubts global warming has been caused by humans, relying on non-scientific material and discredited sources to back his claim.

One month after a United Nations scientific panel delivered its strongest warning yet that humans were causing global warming, the Finance Minister, Nick Minchin, has questioned the link between fossil fuels and greenhouse gas pollution.

In a letter he wrote on March 5 to Clean Up Australia's founder, Ian Kiernan, Senator Minchin took issue with Mr Kiernan's criticism of the minister's scepticism.

"Putting whatever my views might be to one side, I am nevertheless interested in your apparent opinion that anyone who remains to be convinced that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are the cause of climate change is a scientific loony," Senator Minchin said. "I therefore enclose for your information material which indicates that a number of eminent scientists remain in the 'sceptical' camp."

Senator Minchin appears to have taken his advice in part from a collection of columns written by the Canadian newspaper columnist Lawrence Solomon. Among those was one promoting the work of Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark. But that research has proved to contain numerous calculation and methodological errors, say some other scientists.

Senator Minchin also referred Mr Kiernan to a critique of the economic review of global warming by Sir Nicholas Stern. One author of the critique was the retired James Cook University professor Bob Carter. Professor Carter, whose background is in marine geology, appears to have little, if any, standing in the Australian climate science community. He is on the research committee at the Institute of Public Affairs, a think tank that has received funding from oil and tobacco companies, and whose directors sit on the boards of companies in the fossil fuel sector.

The SMH has an article outlining a theory that climate change was responsible for the downfall of Angkor Wat (which is a great place to visit for those who haven't done so).

Climate change was one of the key factors in the abandonment of Cambodia's ancient city of Angkor, Australian archaeologists said today.

The centuries-old city, home to more than 700,000 people and capital of the Khmer empire from about 900AD, was mysteriously abandoned about 500 years ago. It has long been believed the Khmers deserted the city after a Thai army ransacked it, but University of Sydney archaeologists working the site say a water crisis was the real reason it was left to crumble.

"It now appears the city was abandoned during the transition from the medieval warm period to the little ice age," Associate Professor of Archaeology Roland Fletcher said in a statement released by the university. Professor Fletcher said that to sustain a population of 750,000 the Khmers had a meticulously organised water management system.

But blockages found in two large structures that controlled the water system in central Angkor suggested the water management network had begun to breakdown late in the city's history. Professor Fletcher said the discoveries complemented previous field work which had led his team to conclude the city was abandoned when new monsoon patterns, brought about by climate change, had made the site unsustainable.

The SMH also has an interesting article on coal mining in Afghanistan.

Deep beneath the velvet-smooth hills of Pul-i-Khumri, in northern Afghanistan, the Karkar mine is the oldest in the medieval world of Afghan coal-mining. Disturbingly, chunks of the low roof fall on us with Mazan's every blow.

The hot air is thick with oxygen-depriving methane and choking coaldust. Giddy from the mine gases, Mazan's black-faced colleagues shovel the loose coal into wheelbarrows that shed their soft tyres long ago.

Bent double, the miners bump the barrows for hundreds of metres through low-ceilinged tunnels to crude, metal chutes that cascade the fossil fuel from one level of the mine to the next - until again, others shovel it by hand into the battered wagons that will haul it to the surface.

Their battle with the mountain unfolds in a brutal setting that predates the Industrial Revolution. In the muted glimmer of their headlamps, all that can be seen of the men of the pit is the whites of their gimlet eyes and, sometimes, a flash of teeth. ...

The winch is a sad reminder of the brief, good old days at Karkar, which today resembles a dishevelled museum of war and industry. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Czech contractors were brought in to modernise the mine. They did a good job, but through two subsequent wars many of the machines were bombed and looted - or simply abandoned as and where they broke down.

In Karkar it is every man for himself. There is no occupational health and safety officer, no dust suppression and no communications with their reluctant engineers. For all their sweat and blood, they get just two or three dollars a day. Even by Afghanistan's harsh standards, Mohamed Mazan states the obvious: "It's not enough to feed my family and to get my children's school books. But there's nothing else to do … so I'm lucky."

Long ago, they used up all the sturdy steel arches supplied by the Russians to support the tunnels, some of which are so narrow that we have to slither through them. Now they use splintering poplar trunks cut from the banks of nearby creeks - a frightening number of which have snapped.

On the surface, the only noise is the intermittent clang of wagons as they are upended by men who push them with brute force to the end of a buckled little railway high above a stockpile. These days, it grows by a miserable 50 tonnes a day. In the 1980s, Karkar was the country's flagship mine - producing as much as 165,000 tonnes of coal a year.

Yet change is on the way for these hard-bitten miners. Along with other mines around the country, their communist-era workers' co-operative has been sold from under the Karkar workers to a Kabul-based investment syndicate. The deal is part of a hugely ambitious plan to harness Afghanistan's mineral and hydrocarbon wealth. British and American geological survey teams are updating earlier Soviet research that points to rich deposits of gems, precious and base metals, and oil, coal and gas.

New mining laws have been drafted. But as alluring as finds such as the supposedly $US30 bil- lion ($38 billion) Aynak copper deposits sound, extraction of the metal remains a daunting prospect.

Nine foreign companies are bidding for the likely $US2 billion development rights to Aynak, which sits beneath an old al-Qaeda training camp south of Kabul. It promises thousands of jobs, but apart from the risk of becoming an insurgency target, the project would consume vast quantities of water and almost three times as much power as is generated for Kabul today.

The Oil Drum has a post on a (awful) possibility for our energy future - a world where coal isn't just King but Emperor. Heading Out is also, somewhat disturbingly, starting to sound like a global warming skeptic at times - it seems propaganda campaigns can get anyone - hopefully he'll put some time into understanding the unpleasant complexity of climate science instead of just throwing in the odd remark about Greenland and the medieval warm period...

... in dealing with numbers, there is a much more critical one that the book brings up, and that will likely lead to a more detailed post of how true they are (closer than you might like) and that relates to the actual coal reserves that exist. The book notes that the first survey of coal reserves was in 1909 when 2 USGS employees estimated the US held about 3 trillion tons of which about 2 trillion was considered mineable. This study was not superseded until 1974 when Paul Averitt, also of the USGS, did a more detailed study, that brought the practical number down to 483 billion tons of “reserve base” with about 50% of that being recoverable. However, in 1986 the USGS did a detailed study of the Matewan coalfield in south-eastern Kentucky and looked in more detail at the geological constraints that would better define true reserves. From this they concluded that the amount that could be recovered was more likely no more than 30% of the base.

In 1989 this study was updated with the help of the US Bureau of Mines (the agency that was eliminated in the last Administration) who brought a more realistic cost evaluation, from which it was concluded that the more realistic recovery percentages would be in the 5 – 20% range, and that, for places such as the Powder River Basin (where all the coal is currently strip mined for supply as low-sulfur coal to much of the US) may ultimately recover only 11% - given that most of the reserve base lies underground where it can no longer be easily stripped (in much the same as the oil sands of Alberta must ere too long also go underground).

These are worrisome numbers since, regardless of whether the GHG issue is resolved, there has always been this sense that if we gulped hard and accepted the cost (either in health, global warming or clean-up) there would be enough coal to get us through until the magic real answer arrived. Perhaps that is not going to be true, and the limitations of government to control some of these issues is becoming clearer.

Both the authors had been to China, and commented on the primitive nature of the coal mines outside the large industrial sites. Barbara Freese has a very good chapter on how mining arose in China and her visit to a small mine in the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia. Jeff Goodell was in Unumqi, in Xinjiang also in Western China but down closer to the India border but was more involved with the carbon capture theme by that time in the book. Both however tell an engrossing tale about the growth of Chinese mining. It is underlined, with an indication of the problems that the government of that country has in managing the coal industry, by last week’s Time article . Noting that 5,000 miners died in accidents in that country last year, officially, the problems go back to those with which I began this post. Whether in the mines of America and Europe early in the last century, or in China today, the power of the coal owners, and the dreadful working conditions that they impose on their miners, has not changed much. The need for the coal, and the money that can be made does not improve the conditions for many of the small, often illicit mines in the hinterland, and only the owners and the local and bribed officials get rich. ...

Monkeygrinder has a bit of a rant going about people who have belated realised that Hubbert Linearisation isn't the best method of modelling peak oil and that Mobjectivist's shock model deserves more credit than it has been getting around the traps (with the exception of Khebab, who does include it in his comprehensive monthly surveys of the modelling world).

Predicting the Past: The Hubbert Linearization Robert Rapier

It is invalid to use three decades of hindsight for refining the Texas forecast, because we clearly don't have the same option with Saudi Arabia. Yet some argue that the Saudi peak can be forecast with confidence using the knowledge obtained from the case of Texas – a region in which the uncertainty of the method spanned almost 3 decades.

So, the HL has shown that it is good at forecasting the past, but can be very unreliable for predicting the future. In Part II, we will examine the evolution of the Saudi HL over time.

This is a line of reasoning that Mobjectivist has been tracing for years, although unfortunately Robert Rapier, posting on The Oil Drum, did not see fit to reference his work.

MonkeyGrinder is also issuing warnings about the Ides of March (March 21 is a date I've heard bandied about as being ill omened)...

I don't think I've seen a trailer for a book before, but here's the promotional video for the Edwin Black book "Internal Combustion" I mentioned recently.



LJ at Energy Bulletin has noted that petrol prices in Australia are about to make a large, unexplained jump.

Other oil industry news in Australia is Petrol price jumping 17c a litre, the biggest single hike in many years. There may be an entirely innocent explanation for the consumer price hike but the chances of anyone believing it are nil, particularly when no-one can explain it.

The Age has a report on a visit to the non-prison at Guantanamo Bay and the non-prisoners who inhabit it.

SEVERAL weeks ago, I took the media tour at Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a frayed Air Sunshine prop-jet to the time I boarded the same plane to head home, I had no doubt that I was on an alien planet. Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-plus days packed with site visits and interviews (none with prisoners) designed to "make transparent" Guantanamo and its manifold contributions to US national security. Thanks to our military handlers, I learned a great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practise it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo, regardless of what my own eyes and previous knowledge told me.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up:

1. Guantanamo is not a prison. The official term is "detention facility". Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were modelled on prisons in Indiana and Michigan, it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" at Gitmo.

2. Guantanamo has no prisoners, only "enemies". As in "unlawful enemy combatants" or "detained enemy combatants".

3. Once an enemy combatant, always an enemy combatant. "Today, it is not about guilt or innocence. It's about unlawful enemy combatants," Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commanding officer of Guantanamo, told us. "And they are all unlawful enemy combatants." This despite the fact that the Government also has a category for those deemed "no longer an enemy combatant", which was not mentioned. Nor was the possibility of mistaken detention.

4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo. The handlers used the term "habeas lawyers" as a seemingly derogatory catch-all for those who are defending detainees. It was clear that at Gitmo, detainees are believed to be using lawyers in accordance with directives in an al-Qaeda training manual that was discovered in Manchester in 2000: "Take advantage of visits with habeas lawyers to communicate and exchange information with those outside."

5. Reporters misrepresent Guantanamo. The media arrive with ostensibly open eyes, yet graciously hosted from morning to night, they go home perversely refusing to be complimentary to their hosts. They suffer from "the chameleon effect", as I was told more than once, taking on the colours of betrayers, and "we just don't understand it". ...

8. Hard facts are scarce. "You'll notice that we speak vaguely. We can't be specific. You will notice that we talk in approximate terms and estimates only. Those are operational security measures." ...

10. One final lesson: visitors who fail to reproduce the official narrative will be punished. "Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back," one of our escorts warned me over lunch.

The Toronto Star has a review of the movie "300", which seems to have taken a few historical liberties in the creation of a "conservative" fable, which tells the tale of a heroic hard core of slave-owning warriors overcoming the dead weight of their undisciplined and degenerate countrymen to destroy a marauding army of freaks from Iran. Hmmm, I wonder where Hollywood got that idea from...

History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.

Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.

Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.

300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.