Dark Brightness

But it is not getting through becaus it is not the approved view, y’know.

Garrett, by the way, was a talented musician and a political idiot. He is now just a political idiot.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice — fast ice and pack ice — does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. “I don’t think there’s any doubt it is contributing to what we’ve seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica,” he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. “The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west,” he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

“Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off — I’m talking 100km or 200km long — every 10 or 20 or 50 years.”

via Revealed: Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking | The Australian.

I can clearly recall the enviromentalists arguing against hydro power in my youth, and in the last year they have argued against wind power (in Otago) and are starting to argue against more dams..

I think the greens function as druids, but are not prepared to think through the theology of this. The Druids subsumed all to nature — to the point of bonefires. It takes talent and practice to habitually disgust the Romans… who exterminated this religion because of the evil they saw it doing.

We live in an energy hungry world. We are moving from fossil fuel to solar/wind/hydro: this is doable if (like in the US) you exploit your deserts. There will be a cost: here always is.

The SunZia transmission line that would link sun and wind power from central New Mexico with cities in Arizona is just the sort of energy project an environmentalist could love — or hate. And it is just the sort of line the Interior Department has been tasked with promoting — or guarding against.

If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. “We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.

But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

via Renewable Energy’s Environmental Paradox – washingtonpost.com.

Now if you think that this is too much, can I suggest you choose to live a neolithic lifestyle, and accept the drudgery, the sexual dimorphism in tasks, the maternal and child death rate, and the shortened life this entails. I prefer to live in the 21st century.