MEXICO CITY – Surprised tourists found their little piece of Cancun beach paradise ringed by crime-scene tape and gun-toting sailors on Thursday.

Environmental enforcement officers backed by Mexican navy personnel closed off hundreds of feet (dozens of meters) of powder-white coastline in front of a hotel accused of illegally accumulating sand on its beach.

Mexico spent $19 million to replace Cancun beaches washed away by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. But much of the sand pumped from the sea floor has since washed away, leading some property owners to build breakwaters in a bid to retain sand. The practice often merely shifts sand loss to beaches below the breakwaters.
“Today we made the decision to close this stretch of ill-gotten, illegally accumulated sand,” said Patricio Patron, Mexico’s attorney general for environmental protection. “This hotel was telling its tourists: ‘Come here, I have sand … the other hotels don’t, because I stole it.’”

Patron said five people were detained in a raid for allegedly using pumps to move sand from the sea floor onto the beach in front of the Gran Caribe Real Hotel. The hotel is also suspected of illegally building a breakwater that impeded the natural flow of sand onto other hotels’ beaches, he said.

An employee of the hotel’s marketing office said nobody was available to comment on the allegations. Authorities said the hotel owner ignored previous orders to remove the breakwater.

A knot of angry tourists gathered around the closed beach.

Some were irked by the sight of police tape and “Closed” signs.

Maria Bachino, a travel agent from Rocha, Uruguay, said by telephone that she had booked a beachfront room in Cancun, only to find herself cut off from the clear, bathub-temperature waters that lure millions to Cancun each year.

“They promised us a beach,” said Bachino. “This is very unpleasant, we feel bad. This is intimidating,” she said of the armed navy personnel who participated in the raid.

Patron said he regretted any inconvenience for tourists, but said the government is planning projects to restore beaches throughout Cancun in an orderly, environmentally responsible way.

“I apologize to the tourists for this problem, but it is a question of enforcing the law,” Patron said.

PATNA, India (Reuters) – Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.

Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.

“They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains,” Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar’s remote Banke Bazaar town.
“This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily.”

India this year suffered its worst start to the vital monsoon rains in eight decades, causing drought in some states.

Well, well. Congress learned something shattering today, which will have the Church of Al Gore/IPCC running in fear of their lost credibility. It has been scientifically demonstrated that 70% of the Global Warming in the last century (and cooling in the last decade) is due to the Pacific Ocean Oscillations, not CO2:

One necessary result of low climate sensitivity is that the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas emissions in the lastNASA Discovers 70% Of Global Climate Due To Pacific Ocean Oscillations – Not CO2 century is not nearly enough to explain the upward trend of 0.7 deg. C in the last 100 years. This raises the question of whether there are natural processes at work which have caused most of that warming.

On this issue, it can be shown with a simple climate model that small cloud fluctuations assumed to occur with two modes of natural climate variability — the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Southern Oscillation), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — can explain 70% of the warming trend since 1900, as well as the nature of that trend: warming until the 1940s, no warming until the 1970s, and resumed warming since then.

The gentlemen making this claim is the lead investigator one of NASA’s flagship Earth Observing Observatories (H/T Ice Cap). I have the honor of working on this mission on the periphery (Aqua), it is operated out of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

I posted on some of these effects yesterday. What this means is no matter how much you change your CO2 footprint, how much you try to be CO2 green, no matter how much liberal governments tax you – you cannot save the planet from its natural cycles. Remember, the draconian actions being proposed by the Church of Al Gore/IPCC, which will run into the tens of trillions of dollars and cripple the world economies, is only meant to reduce today’s CO2 levels by a fraction.

Say they reduced the CO2 25%. Say the CO2 is the driver for the remaining 30% of Global Warming (which it cannot be, but let’s just be only half as ridiculous as the IPCC), then all that effort would only impact 7.5% of the forces driving the global climate. The other 92.5% would roll on, impervious to the effort. And since CO2 is not 100% of the remaining 30% of the equation (more like 10%), a more realistic expectation is that all the suffering that would go into dropping CO2 levels by 25% would result in a less than 1% change in the forces driving our climate.

In other words, you might as well light a match to all that money because it would have no effect, you would be throwing it away on a fool’s errand.

Must be the week to bust myths, because this means all those efforts to drive down CO2 emissions are a scientifically proven waste of time. I see a lot of Green turning to Red here soon (from the embarrassment of being so wrong).

Update: I like this part of the testimony where the Priests from the Church of Al Gore/IPCC did not even bother to look at this results:

While other researchers need to further explore and validate my claims, I am heartened by the fact that my recent presentation of these results to an audience of approximately 40 weather and climate researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder last week (on July 17, 2008) led to no substantial objections to either the data I presented, nor to my interpretation of those data.

And, curiously, despite its importance to climate modeling activities, no one from Dr. Kevin Trenberth’s facility, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), bothered to drive four miles down the road to attend my seminar, even though it was advertised at NCAR.

Now isn’t that a piece of work?

Update: And for those still thinking the world is melting here are some interesting pictures comparing the Arctic Snow-Ice levels from this week, last year and the year before. Clearly we see that there is significantly more snow and ice at the North Pole than in 2007 (click to go to larger original).

Of the 3 years 2006 had the most snow/ice cover, 2007 the least. 2008 looks to be closer to 2006 given how little ocean in the clear north of Russia. But 2006 had thinner coverage in these areas (thin shown by red) than 2008 (thick shown by purple). So it would seem the sky is not falling – yet.

We’re back from Al Gore’s big global warming speech, and boy did we have a great time! We had a dedicated band of taxpayer advocates out in force, pointing out the high economic cost of global warming alarmism – starting with $8 a gallon gasoline.

Of course, we saw plenty of hypocrisy — especially the fact that Gore didn’t ride his bike or take public transporation to the event. He didn’t even take his Prius! Instead, he brought a fleet of two Lincoln Town Cars and a Chevy Suburban SUV! Even worse, the driver of the Town Car that eventually whisked away Gore’s wife and daughter left the engine idling and the AC cranking for 20 minutes before they finally left!

Let’s examine an important question.

Are the major schemes created by global politicians to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, ostensibly to combat global warming, effective?

The answer is no, because they aren’t about addressing global warming.

They’re about making more money for governments and large corporations.

Let’s start with the Kyoto accord.

Will it be effective in lowering global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? No. It wasn’t meant to be.

Kyoto, a United Nations treaty, exempts the developing world — 143 of 180 nations which ratified it — from lowering emissions.

Since the developing world will account for most future emissions as it undergoes the industrial revolution we began a century ago, emissions will keep rising.

China, exempt from Kyoto, has already surpassed the U.S. (which hasn’t ratified Kyoto dating back to when GHG guru Al Gore was vice-president) as the world’s largest carbon emitter.
Last year, China alone accounted for two-thirds of the global rise in emissions.

Kyoto’s defenders argue it was right to have the developed world, responsible for most emissions up to now, act first, before requiring sacrifices of the developing world.

But that’s a political argument, not an environmental one.

So is the argument Kyoto’s greatest flaw is the U.S. refusal to ratify it.

Incorrect. The much greater flaw was exempting the developing world.

Given that, even if all 37 developed nations required to cut emissions under Kyoto hit their targets (many, including us, won’t), that would be about one-thirteenth of what the UN says needs to be done.

Finally, Kyoto defenders argue we had to start “somewhere.”

But the “somewhere” they started from had nothing to do with the environment.

Their focus was transferring wealth from the developed world to the developing one in return for the right to emit GHG.

‘CLEAN DEVELOPMENT’

One Kyoto scheme is the “clean development mechanism,” where developed countries sponsor emission-reducing projects in developing ones. But since the latter aren’t required to cut emissions, the “clean” mechanism is already dirty. It faces widespread allegations of profiteering, corruption and of increasing emissions.

The biggest scheme Kyoto’s drafters envisioned was emissions trading.

Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), created three years ago, is the centre of a global carbon market valued at $60 billion annually, predicted to grow to $1 trillion in 10 years and to eventually become the world’s largest trading market.

The ETS is a “cap-and-trade” system. Governments set annual caps on emissions, then issue permits to big industrial emitters, who buy and sell them.

That’s led to windfall profits for energy companies and speculators, but has been a bust for the environment and public.

Energy corporations, initially given their permits for free by governments, charged customers as if they had paid for them, resulting in skyrocketing electricity bills.

Emitters convinced governments to hand out more permits than current emissions, destroying the purpose of cap-and-trade, which is to emit less. That caused prices to crash, making it cheaper to buy permits than reduce emissions.

In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper proposes tougher regulations on big GHG emitters, Liberal Leader Stephen Dion a carbon tax and NDP Leader Jack Layton, cap-and-trade.

All have the same goal — putting a direct or indirect price on burning carbon so people can’t afford to consume as much because they will have to pay higher taxes and/or prices for virtually everything.

Don’t be deceived by claims a carbon tax can be “revenue neutral,” which is simply a bookkeeping entry in government ledgers.

NOT ABLE TO ‘CHOOSE’

In the real world, there will be winners and losers, chosen by government, and many of the losers will find they won’t be able to “choose” to lower their emissions, as many victimized folks in the U.K. and Europe are now discovering.

None of these political schemes addresses the underlying issue.

Since we don’t know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere when burning fossil fuels, and renewable energy sources aren’t ready for widespread use, population growth alone will cause emissions to rise until we solve both these problems.

Meanwhile, politicians and CEOs will happily take away more and more of our money, lecturing us they must do so to — insert laughter here — “Save The Planet.”

Planet Earth is on a roll! GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began.

GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere — the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe’s production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it’s been in decades, perhaps in centuries.

Until the 1980s, ecologists had no way to systematically track growth in plant matter in every corner of the Earth — the best they could do was analyze small plots of one-tenth of a hectare or less. The notion of continuously tracking global production to discover the true state of the globe’s biota was not even considered.

Then, in the 1980s, ecologists realized that satellites could track production, and enlisted NASA to collect the data. For the first time, ecologists did not need to rely on rough estimates or anecdotal evidence of the health of the ecology: They could objectively measure the land’s output and soon did — on a daily basis and down to the last kilometre.
The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth’s vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: “Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”

Lush as the planet may now be, it is as nothing compared to earlier times, when levels of CO2 and Earth temperatures were far higher. In the age of the dinosaur, for example, CO2 levels may have been five to 10 times higher than today, spurring a luxuriantly fertile planet whose plant life sated the immense animals of that era. Planet Earth is also much cooler today than during the hothouse era of the dinosaur, and cooler than it was 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warming Period, when the Vikings colonized a verdant Greenland. Greenland lost its colonies and its farmland during the Little Ice Age that followed, and only recently started to become green again.

This blossoming Earth could now be in jeopardy, for reasons both natural and man-made. According to a growing number of scientists, the period of global warming that we have experienced over the past few centuries as Earth climbed out of the Little Ice Age is about to end. The oceans, which have been releasing their vast store of carbon dioxide as the planet has warmed — CO2 is released from oceans as they warm and dissolves in them when they cool — will start to take the carbon dioxide back. With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green, especially in areas such as Canada’s Boreal forests, which have been major beneficiaries of the increase in GPP and NPP.

Doubling the jeopardy for Earth is man. Unlike the many scientists who welcome CO2 for its benefits, many other scientists and most governments believe carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere at all costs. Governments around the world are now enacting massive programs in an effort to remove as much as 80% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.

If these governments are right, they will have done us all a service. If they are wrong, the service could be all ill, with food production dropping world wide, and the countless ecological niches on which living creatures depend stressed. The second order effects could be dire, too. To bolster food production, humans will likely turn to energy intensive manufactured fertilizers, depleting our store of non-renewable resources. Techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere also sound alarms. Carbon sequestration, a darling of many who would mitigate climate change, could become a top inducer of earthquakes, according to Christian Klose, a geohazards researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Because the carbon sequestration schemes tend to be located near cities, he notes, carbon-sequestration-caused earthquakes could exact an unusually high toll.

Amazingly, although the risks of action are arguably at least as real as the risks of inaction, Canada and other countries are rushing into Earth-altering carbon schemes with nary a doubt. Environmentalists, who ordinarily would demand a full-fledged environmental assessment before a highway or a power plant can be built, are silent on the need to question proponents or examine alternatives.

Earth is on a roll. Governments are too. We will know soon enough if we’re rolled off a cliff.

The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday.

The report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency envisions a “energy revolution” that would greatly reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth.

“Meeting this target of 50 percent cut in emissions represents a formidable challenge, and we would require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale,” IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said.

A U.N.-network of scientists concluded last year that emissions have to be cut by at least half by 2050 to avoid an increase in world temperatures of between 3.6 and 4.2 degrees above pre-18th century levels.
Scientists say temperature increases beyond that could trigger devastating effects, such as widespread loss of species, famines and droughts, and swamping of heavily populated coastal areas by rising oceans.

Environment ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized countries and Russia backed the 50 percent target in a meeting in Japan last month and called for it to be officially endorsed at the G-8 summit in July.

The IEA report mapped out two main scenarios: one in which emissions are reduced to 2005 levels by 2050, and a second that would bring them to half of 2005 levels by mid-century.

The scenario for deeper cuts would require massive investment in energy technology development and deployment, a wide-ranging campaign to dramatically increase energy efficiency, and a wholesale shift to renewable sources of energy.

Assuming an average 3.3 percent global economic growth over the 2010-2050 period, governments and the private sector would have to make additional investments of $45 trillion in energy, or 1.1 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, the report said.

That would be an investment more than three times the current size of the entire U.S. economy.

The second scenario also calls for an accelerated ramping up of development of so-called “carbon capture and storage” technology allowing coal-powered power plants to catch emissions and inject them underground.

The study said that an average of 35 coal-powered plants and 20 gas-powered power plants would have to be fitted with carbon capture and storage equipment each year between 2010 and 2050.

In addition, the world would have to construct 32 new nuclear power plants each year, and wind-power turbines would have to be increased by 17,000 units annually. Nations would have to achieve an eight-fold reduction in carbon intensity — the amount of carbon needed to produce a unit of energy — in the transport sector.

Such action would drastically reduce oil demand to 27 percent of 2005 demand. Failure to act would lead to a doubling of energy demand and a 130 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, IEA officials said.

“This development is clearly not sustainable,” said Dolf Gielen, an IEA energy analyst and leader for the project.

Gielen said most of the $45 trillion forecast investment — about $27 trillion — would be borne by developing countries, which will be responsible for two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Most of the money would be in the commercialization of energy technologies developed by governments and the private sector.

“If industry is convinced there will be policy for serious, deep CO2 emission cuts, then these investments will be made by the private sector,” Gielen said.

In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a

Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.

The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather, it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Environmentalism’s goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where “nature” is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.

In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, environmentalists have made “development” an evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power–and every other practical form of energy. Housing, commerce, and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the “rights” of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the “rights” of trees. No instance of the progress that brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those “protecting” the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence.

Nature, they insist, has “intrinsic value,” to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when man wants something.

The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden, a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the “environment.” Had the environmentalist mentality prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation that consistent environmentalists would cheer–at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits of modern science and technology.
The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by “environment” one means the surroundings of man–the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists’ paean to “Nature,” human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the “natural” world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs, but trees, ponds, and bacteria somehow do.

They don’t mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. “The ending of the human epoch on Earth,” writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, “would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’” In a glowing review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, biologist David M. Graber writes (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989): “Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: it mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.

The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives. But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the “needs” of the nonhuman.

To save mankind from environmentalism, what’s needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a “balance” between the needs of man and the “needs” of the environment. To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on earth possible.

Their claim to be eco-warriors has been met with cynicism in recent times.

Sting, for instance, notched up an incredible number of air miles with his band’s world tour.

And it was revealed that his wife Trudie Styler travels between their seven homes in private jets or their fleet of cars, as well as importing farm produce hundreds of miles.

Now the celebrity couple have been forced to admit that their record is less than clean.

Miss Styler, 53, was challenged on the issue when extolling the benefits of organic and locally-grown food.

The interview at the Earls Court Real Food Festival had been going well, until one journalist pointed out that the couple’s carbon footprint has been estimated as 30 times greater than the average Briton’s.

Miss Styler tried to shift a little of the blame on to her musician husband, who is 56.

“When it comes to the carbon footprint, Sting puts his hand up immediately and says ‘I’m a musician and I have a huge carbon-footprint”,’ she said.

She then asked: “Are we being hypocritical?’ before seeming to answer the question herself.

“He has a 750-person crew to bring around the world and it is a difficult challenge.
“I would like to think that we both work pretty hard for the rights of indigenous people and for the rights of conservation of the Amazon rainforest, but we do need to get around. It’s a difficult one.”

Environmental experts labelled Sting’s band, The Police, the dirtiest in the world because of the amount of pollution created during last year’s reunion tour of the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan.

Miss Styler failed to mention in Thursday’s interview that she and their family joined him on much of it.

She also forgot to add that a cavalcade of horseboxes has been known to travel between their Wiltshire pile, The Lake House, and their Tuscan estate twice a year when the family decamps for the summer.

Or indeed, the fact that the organic food she grows on the Italian-estate has to be transported to London for sale in Selfridges.

She was also accused in a recent tribunal of forcing her chef to travel 100 miles to prepare a bowl of pasta.

However, Miss Styler clearly feels she is doing her bit for the planet – and managed to offer some advice on the subject, too.

She said: “I think within the next year we have a period of huge responsibility for this country to keep GM at bay.

“We spend a lot of time in America and you often don’t know when you are eating GM food. I say keep GM out of Britain.”