Two days ago, the "hockey team" became much larger. In Edmonton, Canada, another "hockey team" went out to play ice-hockey and protest against the global warming; see here. They argued that ice-hockey is going to die because of global warming. Needless to say, the outside temperature was minus 23 Celsius degrees: it has become a rule that the alarmists nearly freeze at all of their demonstrations.. It may be useful for these guys to learn that the melting point of ice is at 0 Celsius degrees.
These folks are the Western counterparts of the wild people who protest the cartoons in the streets of the Islamic world. They are mad. They are religious fanatics. They are shootable. They are ready to sacrifice their life or at least health in the name of a crazy religious dogma that is patently false.
In the Islamic case, this dogma says that a militant religious bigot from the 7th century is indirectly in charge of this planet and should be permanently worshipped - and those who don't worship him should be beheaded. In the Western case, the dogma says that the production of carbon dioxide is a sin that brings the humankind closer to the judgement day and universal death - and those who don't hate carbon dioxide should be humiliated and removed from the mainstream society.
As you can see, the Western example is more moderate. The main reason is that the education systems in most of the Islamic world are truly miserable.
In the past, we have discussed various subtleties of the energy budget of the Earth, simple calculations of the sea level dynamics, melting of ice, autocorrelations, and similar topics. The mechanisms that confine carbon dioxide were not among the most frequently discussed questions.
It turns out that one particular species of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) - a creature similar to shrimp - is sequestering carbon dioxide produced by 35 million cars during the same period of time. How do they do it? Krills are afraid of whales who eat them, so they parachute from the surface to the deep ocean many times a night and deposit a lot of carbon to the deep layers through their excrements. The importance of this effect seems to be much higher than thought previously.
Sequesteration of the particles on the seabed also turns out to be very different than what was assumed so far. All existing models involving these phenomena near the sea floor assumed that the journey of the particles - something that was responsible for the appearence of fossil fuels - is fast, vertical, and unimportant. It was realized this week that the journey is slow, nearly horizontal, and important. The journey may take thousands of years. All these things will have to be reinvestigated before a realistic detailed picture of the carbon cycles emerges and before trustworthy models may be constructed.
All reasonable people know that there is obviously a lot of important phenomena that science has not yet fully understood. On the other hand, it may take just a couple of years for a detailed analysis of these things because these are straightforward questions, no quantum gravity. And once we know these things, and probably before we know them in their entirety, it will become easy to design technologies that will push the carbon cycle in a desired direction if we need.
This prediction is, of course, a nightmare for the global warming religious fanatics because they would prefer to transform their global warming stories into a permanent religion and one of the most important questions of this civilization - i.e. to give this stupidity a similar status like the status of the miserable prophet mentioned above. The main logic is identical in both cases: it is the assumption that we have already found the most important thing in the world - either the prophet or global warming - and the only goal is to guarantee that the dozens of future generations will share the belief and all threats of progress will be eliminated.
Such approaches may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, the progress in the Islamic world was virtually stopped. The attempts of the left-wing climate activists to dictate how people should live not only today but even in 2100 are very similar and have a similar capacity to stop any progress.
Hon. Rona Ambrose PC
The abbreviation PC is neither "politically correct" :-) nor "personal computer". It means neither a "principal component" or a "petacoulomb". She is a privy counsellor.
The first story of this article could lead the reader to an incorrect conclusion that the citizens of Edmonton are crazy people who protest against the hypothetical death of ice-hockey caused by global warming by playing it in minus 23 degrees Celsius. That would be very unfair and kind of strange given the fact that Edmonton is in Alberta.
Let me choose another random citizen of Edmonton, namely Rona Ambrose.
She definitely thinks that the international treaties to curb the emissions are wrong. Why is her opinion so interesting? Well, it's because now she's not only the new environment minister of Canada but she has also become the #1 person to oversee the Kyoto protocol in the United Nations. That's encouraging because she is probably the first leader of the Kyoto protocol ever who realizes that the protocol is bullshit.
We see some progress in the U.N. if a male, ugly, left-wing, confused sociologist is replaced by a female, attractive, right-wing, bright political scientist. Massachusetts Hall must be cited for the comparison of the academic fields. ;-) On the other hand, when I say that Rona Ambrose is female, I should also add that the feminists disagree and consider Ms Ambrose to be an old white man.
She's not the only one among her collaborators who fails to support Kyoto. Monte Solberg, the Canadian immigration minister, is a blogger and a self-described radical environmentalist who wants to clear the air etc. (like me). But on his blog, he explains, in a very entertaining way, how the Canadian economy must be stopped but they will still be short of the targets. More precisely, Mr. Solberg has recycled some calculations of another surprisingly attractive old white man, Licia Corbella.
