To meet government imposed emissions reduction targets, household utility bills in the United Kingdom are forecast to skyrocket by a factor of four by the end of the decade and, by 2020, many industries dependent on energy may be wiped out, according to a Mail Online article.

A massive rethink on the cost of ‘green energy’ is taking place in Whitehall among senior regulators and industry, leading some to question whether the public will be prepared to pay increasingly high bills for the UK to become greener than most countries.

Officials at regulator Ofgem now privately admit that a report they issued only last year severely underestimates the cost of cutting carbon emissions by building a new energy infrastructure for the UK.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk

In the UK, elderly customers at charity shops are buying up hardback books – as cheap fuel.

Cheaper than coal?

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

read the full article in metro.co.uk, Pensioners burn books for warmth.

Since I’ve never been nominated for one of these, it’s no big deal to me that the 2009 Weblog awards have been canceled.

What is interesting, though, is the reason that they’ve been canceled.

It seems that voting is just too resource intensive – and expensive.

For more on the story see 2009.weblogawards.org.

… more than a tad unusual lately, here in Arkansas, as I’m sure it seems to people in a lot of other places.

But, the weather for the next week is…, well…, ah…, it’s Winter!

It’s winter like winter was when I was a kid growing up in Nebraska.  It’s cold – and it’s staying cold.

And it’s doing it in a lot of places other than Arkansas.

Something called the Arctic Oscillation has gone into a deep negative phase, where atmospheric pressure in the Arctic is relatively high, while pressure is low in the middle latitudes.  In the negative phase, frigid winter weather extends further  into  the middle of North America than usual.

Hopefully, this thing will moderate soon – but I’m not counting on it.

How’s the weather where you are?

Even though it’s a new year – and a new decade –, the scandal over the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East has not gone away.  In an opinion in The Australian, Prof. Garth Paltridge says, “It seems that a religious belief in disastrous climate change has destroyed their common sense….” and that the scandal may demonstrate that the idea of a scientific consensus on global warming  is likely nonsense.  He also suggests that actions by the scientists involved may have been illegal.

 

In any event, the CRU information is covered by environmental information regulations that specifically require public bodies in Britain to make their data progressively available to the public by electronic means that are easily accessible.

So the ducking and weaving in the face of reasonable requests for CRU data by outside scientists and indeed in the face of Freedom of Information requests by those same outside scientists may not be just bad scientific form. It may be illegal. Which makes the lukewarm reaction to Climategate by the great and powerful of the scientific establishment even more difficult to swallow.

Read the full article:  Boffins may be illegal

Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in Tasmania as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He retired in 2002 and continues to live in Hobart. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and author of The Climate Caper .

One of the things that really confounds me about anthropogenic global warming is the lack of direct evidence of the link between rising CO² levels and the threat of major warming.

Yes, the earth has warmed slightly over the last 100+ year; yes, CO² concentration has been rising as a result of the use of carbon based fuels; and, yes, many scientists claim that because of this correlation, lacking any other cause, CO² produced by human activity is causing the earth’s temperature to rise.

However, correlation does NOT prove causation.

On Joanne Nova’s first post of 2010, Is there any evidence, she lays out what the evidence needs to be.

Scientific evidence for the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the main cause of global warming needs to be:

1. Empirical – That which we can see, hear, record, or write down. A measurement of some sort. An observation of the natural world.
2. Related to CAUSE and EFFECT. That means evidence that shows that our extra carbon caused most of the recent warming. Not just evidence that the world has got warmer (which could be due to some other reason).
3. Evidence that shows carbon has a major role, that doubling the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause, say, 2 – 10 degrees of warming. If doubling carbon only causes 0.5 degrees of warming, who cares?

It doesn’t matter how many associations, unions, or Nobel-Prize-winning Saints believe in a theory. If they claim there is evidence, by thousands of scientists in peer reviewed papers, then it should easy for them to provide it. The problem is, all those thousands of papers are either not empirical, not related to the cause of the warming, or do not show carbon has a major role.

( read all of Joanne’s post at Is there any evidence?)

Contrary the opinions of many, the products of climate computer models are not evidence, but, rather, indicators of what the climate might be based on what is programmed into them.  If the programming assumed that warming will occur with rising CO², then as CO² rises in the models’ projections, global temperature also rises.

Where is the evidence? Is there any?

The only program that I’ve found so far that I wasn’t able to install on Windows 7 was my OmniPage 14 OCR program.

For those who don’t know the term, OCR stands for optical character recognition – in other words, a program that recognizes text in a scanned image and turns it into editable text.

For Christmas, I received a copy of OmniPage 17.  I plan to use it in a long range project that involves old public domain books.

Like any other processing software, an OCR program will to some degree be limited by the quality of the data, or, in this case, images, that is provided as input.

For my first test of the program, I loaded a pdf file of a 440 page book published in 1913.  OmniPage 17 was able to load and process the entire book, unlike previous versions of OmniPage and other OCR software that I have used, though  I’m sure that, at the time, they had also been somewhat limited by the operating systems and computers.

During the processing, OmniPage 17 flags text that it is not “certain” of and provides the user with the opportunity to correct or ignore the text.  The percentage of flagged text is far lower than I expected.

After the book was processed by OmniPage, I saved it and proofed it in Microsoft Word.

The proofing was, by far, the hardest part of the process.  I read the entire book, with much more attention to detail than I would have if I had just been reading it for pleasure, in order to correct any errors that the OCR might have made as well as to italicize words that were in italics in the book.  Again, the number of corrections needed were far fewer than I expected.  I suspect that there were be very few corrections needed when converting modern documents from image to text.

What was the book that I converted, some might wonder?

It’s part of the long term project, so I don’t want to be too specific at this time other than to say that it was a diary of a lady who had been raised in privilege.

A carbon tax poised to take effect on January 1, 2010, in France has been declared  illegal.  France’s Constitutional Council says that the tax burden was distributed unfairly and that there were too many exempt polluters. 

Observers say the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan and as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected to be generated the tax.

Read more in Deutsche Welle’s French carbon tax declared illegal.

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal online, Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), discusses why the United Nations should no longer be in the business of climate change.

 

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen Climate conference, it is clear that the United Nations-driven process is a bust, and that any similar process requiring economic suicide and massive wealth transfers will go nowhere. It is long since time to drop this charade, take the question of climate change out of the hands of the U.N., and implement more reasonable policies.

Fostering the resilience of societies around the world in case climate disaster strikes would be a start. Central to this process is for governments to stop making things worse, as they do when they subsidize risk-taking.

read more at Get the U. N. Out of the Climate Business