In an effort to prove that they are right, when in fact they are wrong, global warming propagandists have been happily pushing breaking Antarctic ice shelves down our throats.

Yes, would you believe it, but a giant slab has broken off the Wilkins Ice Shelf, apparently because of warming seas.

Hold on a second … hasn’t summer just ended there?

Aside from that inconvenience, consider the following:

Cold weather in Antarctica causes water to precipitate out of the air in the form of snow. The snow gathers on the ground, forming glaciers. Gravity drags these glaciers down to the coast, where they are pushed out to sea to form ice shelves. Every day, tides rise and tides fall. Cracks form. When the cracks join up, large chunks of ice fall off.

This has always happened! This is what causes icebergs, which drift into warmer seas and harrass shipping, eventually melting.

(Its not quite as simple as that, of course. In the 1970s, the Pacific Decedal Ocillation, the circumpolar ocean currents, changed slightly. As a result, warmer water has come into contact with the Western Antarctic Peninsula, so that has had a contributory effect.)

In the meantime, ice shelves on the eastern side of Antarctica have grown to such an extent that there has been a net increase in ice levels for Antarctica as a whole, with mass changes of -95 +/-11 Gt per annum in West Antarctica and +142 +/-10 Gt per annum in East Antarctic. So far this year the Antarctic sea ice is already increasing at an above normal rate just two weeks after the end of the Antarctic sea ice melting season.

Oops, sorry, that’s “climate change bollocks,” isn’t it?

Having been away for a bit over a month, I come back to find that the latest data from Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS has shown that global temperatures have fallen from between 0.65C and 0.75C. That’s just about large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

“Don’t worry, I’m just about to begin a new speaking tour. We’ll soon turn that around,” said Al Gore in a statement.

Ken Livingstone conceded defeat in his lawsuit with Porche on the news, and promised to tax Fiat Panda owners instead.

The City of London announced a new form of derivative: CSOs (Collateralised Snow Obligations).

David Cameron has said that the development of “green coal” will be a priority for a future Conservative government, according to the BBC today. Apparently, he plan’s to have the CO2 “captured” and pumped into empty North Sea oil and gas fields.

Again, the politicians get it completely wrong.

When coal is burned, the CO2 emitted is relatively dilute, making CO2 capture unrealistic. To solve this problem, the coal industry has come up with a new process called coal gasification. Water and oxygen are mixed with the coal to (chemically) create carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen is used as the fuel source for electricity generation, and the carbon monoxide is converted to concentrated CO2. And here’s the main reason this technology is nuts: around 25% of the energy produced is consumed just in keeping the plant operating.

For every tonne of coal consumed, 3.7 tonnes of CO2 is generated. It would be great if this CO2 could be pumped straight into the ground on-site. But Cameron is proposing pumping the CO2 out to the North Sea, so new pipelines are going to have to be laid from every power station, at what, £1m per mile or so?

Before the CO2 can be pumped underground, it has to be compressed into a liquid - a step that typically consumes a further 20% of the energy yielded by burning coal in the first place.

So that’s 45% of the generating capacity of the power station used to deal with the CO2, so far. Good, eh?

The state of the captured CO2 must be closely monitored - it’s at such a high concentration that should it leak, it would poison the North Sea.

How is this better than nuclear power?

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

Dec. 13, 2007

 

His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon

Secretary-General, United Nations

New York, N.Y.

 

Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

 

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

 

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

 

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

 

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

 

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:

• Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea- level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
• The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
• Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is “settled,” significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.

The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the “precautionary principle” because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.

The current UN focus on “fighting climate change,” as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.

Yours faithfully,

Signatories of an open letter on the UN climate-conference

The following are signatories to the Dec. 13th letter to the Ban Ki- moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations on the UN Climate conference in Bali:

Don Aitkin, PhD, Professor, social scientist, retired vice-chancellor and president, University of Canberra, Australia

William J.R. Alexander, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Civil and Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Member, UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, 1994-2000

Bjarne Andresen, PhD, physicist, Professor, The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Geoff L. Austin, PhD, FNZIP, FRSNZ, Professor, Dept. of Physics, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Timothy F. Ball, PhD, environmental consultant, former climatology professor, University of Winnipeg

Ernst-Georg Beck, Dipl. Biol., Biologist, Merian-Schule Freiburg, Germany

Sonja A. Boehmer-Christiansen, PhD, Reader, Dept. of Geography, Hull University, U.K.; Editor, Energy & Environment journal

Chris C. Borel, PhD, remote sensing scientist, U.S.

Reid A. Bryson, PhD, DSc, DEngr, UNE P. Global 500 Laureate; Senior Scientist, Center for Climatic Research; Emeritus Professor of Meteorology, of Geography, and of Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin

Dan Carruthers, M.Sc., wildlife biology consultant specializing in animal ecology in Arctic and Subarctic regions, Alberta

R.M. Carter, PhD, Professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia

Ian D. Clark, PhD, Professor, isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa

Richard S. Courtney, PhD, climate and atmospheric science consultant, IPCC expert reviewer, U.K.

Willem de Lange, PhD, Dept. of Earth and Ocean Sciences, School of Science and Engineering, Waikato University, New Zealand

David Deming, PhD (Geophysics), Associate Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma

Freeman J. Dyson, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, N.J.

Don J. Easterbrook, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Geology, Western Washington University

Lance Endersbee, Emeritus Professor, former dean of Engineering and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Monasy University, Australia

Hans Erren, Doctorandus, geophysicist and climate specialist, Sittard, The Netherlands

Robert H. Essenhigh, PhD, E.G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University

Christopher Essex, PhD, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Associate Director of the Program in Theoretical Physics, University of Western Ontario

David Evans, PhD, mathematician, carbon accountant, computer and electrical engineer and head of ‘Science Speak,’ Australia

William Evans, PhD, editor, American Midland Naturalist; Dept. of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame

Stewart Franks, PhD, Professor, Hydroclimatologist, University of Newcastle, Australia

R. W. Gauldie, PhD, Research Professor, Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, School of Ocean Earth Sciences and Technology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Lee C. Gerhard, PhD, Senior Scientist Emeritus, University of Kansas; former director and state geologist, Kansas Geological Survey

Gerhard Gerlich, Professor for Mathematical and Theoretical Physics, Institut für Mathematische Physik der TU Braunschweig, Germany

Albrecht Glatzle, PhD, sc.agr., Agro-Biologist and Gerente ejecutivo, INTTAS, Paraguay

Fred Goldberg, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Royal Institute of Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden

Vincent Gray, PhD, expert reviewer for the IPCC and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of ‘Climate Change 2001, Wellington, New Zealand

William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University and Head of the Tropical Meteorology Project

Howard Hayden, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Connecticut

Louis Hissink MSc, M.A.I.G., editor, AIG News, and consulting geologist, Perth, Western Australia

Craig D. Idso, PhD, Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona

Sherwood B. Idso, PhD, President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, AZ, USA

Andrei Illarionov, PhD, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity; founder and director of the Institute of Economic Analysis

Zbigniew Jaworowski, PhD, physicist, Chairman - Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, Warsaw, Poland

Jon Jenkins, PhD, MD, computer modelling - virology, NSW, Australia

Wibjorn Karlen, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden

Olavi Kärner, Ph.D., Research Associate, Dept. of Atmospheric Physics, Institute of Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics, Toravere, Estonia

Joel M. Kauffman, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia

David Kear, PhD, FRSNZ, CMG, geologist, former Director-General of NZ Dept. of Scientific & Industrial Research, New Zealand

Madhav Khandekar, PhD, former research scientist, Environment Canada; editor, Climate Research (2003-05); editorial board member, Natural Hazards; IPCC expert reviewer 2007

William Kininmonth M.Sc., M.Admin., former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological organization’s Commission for Climatology Jan J.H. Kop, MSc Ceng FICE (Civil Engineer Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers), Emeritus Prof. of Public Health Engineering, Technical University Delft, The Netherlands

Prof. R.W.J. Kouffeld, Emeritus Professor, Energy Conversion, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Salomon Kroonenberg, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Geotechnology, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Hans H.J. Labohm, PhD, economist, former advisor to the executive board, Clingendael Institute (The Netherlands Institute of International Relations), The Netherlands

The Rt. Hon. Lord Lawson of Blaby, economist; Chairman of the Central Europe Trust; former Chancellor of the Exchequer, U.K.

Douglas Leahey, PhD, meteorologist and air-quality consultant, Calgary

David R. Legates, PhD, Director, Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware

Marcel Leroux, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Climatology, University of Lyon, France; former director of Laboratory of Climatology, Risks and Environment, CNRS

Bryan Leyland, International Climate Science Coalition, consultant and power engineer, Auckland, New Zealand

William Lindqvist, PhD, independent consulting geologist, Calif.

Richard S. Lindzen, PhD, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A.J. Tom van Loon, PhD, Professor of Geology (Quaternary Geology), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland; former President of the European Association of Science Editors

Anthony R. Lupo, PhD, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science, Dept. of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Science, University of Missouri-Columbia

Richard Mackey, PhD, Statistician, Australia

Horst Malberg, PhD, Professor for Meteorology and Climatology, Institut für Meteorologie, Berlin, Germany

John Maunder, PhD, Climatologist, former President of the Commission for Climatology of the World Meteorological Organization (89-97), New Zealand

Alister McFarquhar, PhD, international economy, Downing College, Cambridge, U.K.

Ross McKitrick, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Economics, University of Guelph

John McLean, PhD, climate data analyst, computer scientist, Australia

Owen McShane, PhD, economist, head of the International Climate Science Coalition; Director, Centre for Resource Management Studies, New Zealand

Fred Michel, PhD, Director, Institute of Environmental Sciences and Associate Professor of Earth Sciences, Carleton University

Frank Milne, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Economics, Queen’s University

Asmunn Moene, PhD, former head of the Forecasting Centre, Meteorological Institute, Norway

Alan Moran, PhD, Energy Economist, Director of the IPA’s Deregulation Unit, Australia

Nils-Axel Morner, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Lubos Motl, PhD, Physicist, former Harvard string theorist, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

John Nicol, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Physics, James Cook University, Australia

David Nowell, M.Sc., Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, former chairman of the NATO Meteorological Group, Ottawa

James J. O’Brien, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Meteorology and Oceanography, Florida State University

Cliff Ollier, PhD, Professor Emeritus (Geology), Research Fellow, University of Western Australia

Garth W. Paltridge, PhD, atmospheric physicist, Emeritus Professor and former Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia

R. Timothy Patterson, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Earth Sciences (paleoclimatology), Carleton University

Al Pekarek, PhD, Associate Professor of Geology, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Dept., St. Cloud State University, Minnesota

Ian Plimer, PhD, Professor of Geology, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide and Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia

Brian Pratt, PhD, Professor of Geology, Sedimentology, University of Saskatchewan

Harry N.A. Priem, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Planetary Geology and Isotope Geophysics, Utrecht University; former director of the Netherlands Institute for Isotope Geosciences

Alex Robson, PhD, Economics, Australian National University Colonel F.P.M. Rombouts, Branch Chief - Safety, Quality and Environment, Royal Netherland Air Force

R.G. Roper, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Arthur Rorsch, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Molecular Genetics, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, principal consultant, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, B.C.

Tom V. Segalstad, PhD, (Geology/Geochemistry), Head of the Geological Museum and Associate Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, University of Oslo, Norway

Gary D. Sharp, PhD, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, CA

S. Fred Singer, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia and former director Weather Satellite Service

L. Graham Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Geography, University of Western Ontario

Roy W. Spencer, PhD, climatologist, Principal Research Scientist, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama, Huntsville

Peter Stilbs, TeknD, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Research Leader, School of Chemical Science and Engineering, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm, Sweden

Hendrik Tennekes, PhD, former director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute

Dick Thoenes, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Chemical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Brian G Valentine, PhD, PE (Chem.), Technology Manager - Industrial Energy Efficiency, Adjunct Associate Professor of Engineering Science, University of Maryland at College Park; Dept of Energy, Washington, DC

Gerrit J. van der Lingen, PhD, geologist and paleoclimatologist, climate change consultant, Geoscience Research and Investigations, New Zealand

Len Walker, PhD, Power Engineering, Australia

Edward J. Wegman, PhD, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Virginia

Stephan Wilksch, PhD, Professor for Innovation and Technology Management, Production Management and Logistics, University of Technolgy and Economics Berlin, Germany

Boris Winterhalter, PhD, senior marine researcher (retired), Geological Survey of Finland, former professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, Finland

David E. Wojick, PhD, P.Eng., energy consultant, Virginia

Raphael Wust, PhD, Lecturer, Marine Geology/Sedimentology, James Cook University, Australia

A. Zichichi, PhD, President of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva, Switzerland; Emeritus Professor of Advanced Physics, University of Bologna, Italy

Following a press conference in Bali debunking the global warming hoax, British Lord Christoper Monckton issued a statement in which he identified the hoax as the third UN-backed slaughter of the world’s poorest people. “The international community has galloped lemming-like over the cliff twice before,” he said. “Twenty years ago, the UN decided not to regard AIDS as a fatal infection. Carriers of the disease were not identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor countries…. “Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only effective agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in poor countries.”

Monckton was joined by an international team of scientists at the Bali conference, who have debunked the global warming hoax, and came to counter-organise the “circus.”

“The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money,” Lord Monckton said, “and we no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC” … “UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference.” He urged the Bali conference delegates to “have the courage to do nothing”

Monckton’s co-heretics included:

• Dr. David Evans, an Australian mathemetician who has done carbon accounting for the Australian government, who said, “We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don’t cause global warming.” He described the models as “wrong,” and said that new research, published in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology, found that “warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence.” Evans has authored a Nov. 28, 2007 paper titled, “Carbon Emissions Don’t Cause Global Warming.” Evans stated that “official science driven by politics, money, and power,” is going in one direction, and “unofficial science” has started to move off in a different direction.
• Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, involved with the IPCC since 1990, who shared a Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC, stated: “There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any effect whatsoever on the climate. All of the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time.” Gray wrote the book, “The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of `Climate Change 2001.’ ”
• Another New Zealander, Bryan Leland, warned participants that all discussions of “carbon trading” should be viewed with suspicion. “We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to `solve’ a problem that probably does not exist.”

Business Secretary John Hutton announced on today’s BBC Politics Show that the UK would be solving its CO2 problems by building off shore wind farms all round the coastline of the UK. Now, anyone who has either been to the UK coast, or has seen the Open University’s series Coast, will know that the UK has some of the most beautiful coastline anywhere. To plaster these travesties of taste around the place may impress a bunch of green nuts, but I doubt the tourism or fishing industries will be jumping for joy.

Apparently the government’s plan is to have all UK homes powered by these things by 2020. I’d imagine that in order to guarantee suitable airflow to keep them turning all year round, they are going to move the Houses of Parliament offshore as well.

This is the wrong strategy.

… or does it?

Now that Australia has thrown out one idiot and elected another, the USA is the only major economy with the guts to stand up to the UN’s global warming bullshit. I guess its about time they got something right.

In the meantime, only 75 of the 179 signatories have ratified the treaty (pdf warning). Some, like Canada, are backtracking as fast as they can. And while individual suckers run around “doing their bit,” changing their light bulbs and cycling to work, Fat Al continues to use more energy in his home than it takes to power most modern nation states.

From a friend in France, whose parents live in Chamonix:

“I see that the demise of French skiing stations, due to global warming, has been postponed for another year. There is an unusual amount of early snow and the glaciers grew this year …”

The British press, especially the BBC, is full of Global Warming nonsense at the moment, due to the release of the IPCC report (pdf warning).

According to the propaganda, humanity doesn’t have the technology to deal with this problem today. Oops. I’m told, therefore, that I’m going to have to find a way to reduce my household energy use by up to 40%. My small business is going to be subject to new “standards” and “certifications.” I’m going to be subject to new taxes. All this, on top of the other restrictions on my behaviour imposed by the other great dictatorial initiative, the “war on terror.”

This lack of available technology is the biggest lie of them all. We DO have the technology to deal with CO2 emissions, TODAY!

The answer is … wait for it … nuclear. Yes, that demon of the 20th century has the capability to rid us of our CO2 emissions within a matter of a few years. And yet, I can hear the same environmental lobby that is pushing the CO2 lie so hard screaming at me that nuclear power is unsafe, it produces horrible waste products which cannot be dealt with. Another lie.

Some Facts About Nuclear

• It would take 2 million grams of oil, or 3 million grams of coal, to equal the power contained in 1 gram of uranium fuel.
• Unlike oil and coal, nuclear fuel is recyclable.
• Modern reactor designs are safe - Chernobyl would not be possible, no matter how badly managed the facility.
• In a breeder reactor, more fuel can be produced than is used up.
• Unlike any other form of energy production, the cost of waste disposal and recycling is built into the cost of the energy.

The environmentalist fear of nuclear energy is irrational, just as is their fear of climate change. The best way to overcome this type of irrational fear is through knowledge. So, read on, overcome your fears if you have them, and maybe you’ll come to question the motives of the priests of the global warming religion.

The Nuclear Fuel Cycle

At the beginning of the nuclear age, it was assumed that nations would complete the fuel cycle, including the processing of spent fuel, so as to get as near to 100% use of the uranium fuel as possible. There are seven main steps in this cycle:

First, naturally occurring Uranium is mined. Although we have enough sources of Uranium for today’s immediate needs, we would soon have to accelerate the development of fast breeder reactors if we were to use nuclear power as the central thrust of our climate change strategy. Fast breeder reactors produce more fuel than they consume in operation.

Next the uranium is processed and milled into uranium oxide, U3O8, called yellowcake, which is the raw material for fission fuel.

The concentrated uranium is then converted to uranium hexaflouride, UF6, which is heated into a gas to make it suitable for enrichment.

Natural uranium has one primary isotope, U-238, which is not fissionable, and a much smaller amount of U-235, which is. As a result, the uranium fuel must go through a process of enrichment, to increase the ration of fissionable U-235 to the non-fissionable U-238.

Once the enriched uranium is separated from the depleted uranium, it is converted from UF6 into uranium dioxide and fabricated into uniform pellets. The pellets are loaded into long tubes made from zirconium alloy, which captures very few neutrons. The fuel is then transported to the reactor site.

Fuel rods are used for about four and a half years before replacement. When removed from the reactor, the spent fuel is put into cooling pools, which shield it as short lived nuclides decay. Within a year, the radioactivity is only about 12% of what it was when the fuel rod came out of the reactor. This spent fuel contains between 90 and 96 percent usable uranium. It also contains about 1% plutonium, a fuel suitable for breeder reactors.

The spent fuel rods are sent for reprocessing, a process which removes the highly radioactive fission products (3%), and separate out the fissionable U-235 (96%) and the plutonium (1%). Aside from being used in breeder reactors, the plutonium can be used to make mixed 0xide fuel (MOX), which some of the world’s reactors are being converted to use as fuel.

Dealing With Waste

Reprocessing vastly reduces the quantity of waste from nuclear fission. Only 3% of the material sent for reprocessing is unusable High Level Waste. That’s approximately 750kgs from a 1000MW reactor. Read that again - 750 kilogrammes.

This 750 kgs of material is normally incorporated into solid blocks of borosilicate glass, in a process known as vitrification.

Vitrification produces a stable solid that has the high-level waste incorporated its structure. That 750kgs of waste from a 1000MW reactor is contained in 5 tonnes of such glass, which can be readily transported and stored, with appropriate shielding.

There is a cooling period of about 50 years between removal from the reactor and disposal, with the conditioned HLW being retained in interim storage. The level of radioactivity and heat fall rapidly in the first few years and is down to about one thousandth of the level at discharge by 40 years. Many countries are developing plans for disposal of HLW in geological repositories buried in stable rock formations hundreds of metres beneath the surface, although there is currently no pressing technical need to establish such facilities, as the total volume of such wastes is relatively small.

So if we reprocess, how much waste is produced each year? The UK generating capacity is presently about 70GW. In one year, therefore, we would produce 53 tonnes of high level waste if we were completely nuclear. At any one time, based on a 50 year cycle before this waste can be vitrified, we would be storing close to 3000 tonnes of HLW, equivalent to approx 450,000 litres. To put that in perspective, it compares to 5.5 billion litres of oil based fuels stored in the UK at any one time. I think even the UK has enough space that waste could be stored without being in someone’s back yard.

Useful By-products Of Nuclear Energy Generation

• Fresh water
• Hydrogen (pdf warning)
  
• Oxygen
• Precious metals such as palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium (pdf warning)
• Radioisotopes for medicine

A World Based Around Nuclear Energy

The propaganda pushed upon me recently by the BBC and others, promotes a world where I must save energy, reduce my “carbon footprint.” This is a world which will devolve scientifically and technologically. It’s a world of slavery, where everything I do is taxed to “offset” my use of energy. It is a world where 3rd world countries are not permitted to develop, and where people continue to starve due to biofoolery. It is a world where the rich get richer by blowing bubbles.

I would much rather see a world of technological progress, where third world countries are encouraged to develop into modern nation states. Where fighting wars for raw materials are a thing of the past. Where huge areas of desert are irrigated and turned into workable land. Where I can travel to London in 15 minutes, with trains running every 5. Where I can breathe the air without choking, where the birds don’t have to shout because of the traffic noise. Where goods are transported out of sight, so we don’t have road congestion.

So whether or not you are a fully signed up member of the Church of Climate Change, I urge you to consider the motivations of those who say that nuclear power does not provide us with the one and only presently existing solution to our carbon dioxide “problem.” Because its unlikely that they believe their own hype.

As reported by Lucy Sherriff at The Register and elsewhere, a couple of quite detailed “scientific” papers have been released, stating that bacteria are responsible for global warming, and not mankind at all.

While this might seem great for those who understand that the global warming hoax is in reality a promotion of genocidal policies for the 3rd world, combined with a whole new financial bubble for the 1st world, it turns out that these papers are fake. The intent is to fool people into discrediting themselves.

Lucy Sherriff thinks this is “nifty.” Not the word I would use, and in the end, the whole exercise has not been very well executed, as neither paper was released by a university that actually has a climatology department.

The question is, who’s behind it all? It’s another demonstration that the global warming cult is agenda driven, it seems to me. Although I am not suggesting Al Gore is personally behind this, he does represent a couple of obvious agendas:

• Al Gore, along with many of his collaborators, is a racist. He got into politics in the first place with a seat in Congress as a reward for his part in the frame up of Morris Haddox, an African American political leader, who was trying to stop Nashville police from destroying the community by allowing unhindered narcotics trafficking and prostitution. This frame up was in turn part of the FBI’s Operation Fruehmenschen (German for “early” or “primitive men”), in which black politicans and officials were illegally targeted and smeared, from the late 50’s until the mid 1970’s. Al’s racism came to public notice in 1999, when he condemned millions of Africans to a lingering death by denying them access to generic Aids drugs. So agenda number one for pushing the global warming fraud is racial - preventing 3rd world, and particularly African, countries from developing.
• Gore, along with many of his collaborators, benefits personally, via his financial interests. His hedge fund companies specialise in so-called “carbon trading”, another name for scamming millions of dollars from unsuspecting businesses in what can only be described as a private tax.

So when someone attempts to sucker right minded people into discrediting themselves, I wouldn’t use the word “nifty.” Nor would I hail them, as Ms Sherriff does. I’d ask why these people think that carbon trading and research into “carbon sinks” is better than nuclear power, hydrogen fueled cars, and research into nuclear fusion?

Nicolas Sarkozy, Al Gore and European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, jointly announced their policy (their policy?!) for France at a ceremony last week which involved practically all French ministers, environmental associations, leaders of trades unions and business leaders.

The main thrust of the policy statement is the creation of a nonsense green economic driver, complete with its very own financial bubble.

Among the nonsense: special labels for “carbon-free” products, a “carbon tax” on all “carbon-heavy” products (does this mean inflation on pencils?), and a possible complete rewriting of the French tax code. In the future, all public projects will be adopted on their basis of their “carbon compatibility.” Good God.

Obviously on drugs, Sarkozy committed France to the building of no new nuclear power stations, instead opting for a guarantee that every euro spent on nuclear energy in the future, another euro would be spent on “renewable energies.”

It wasn’t all bad news, though. The French intend to replace 3 million lorries on their roads between 2012 and 2020 by the creation of 2000km of new TGV railway lines, with the old lines being held over for goods transport. They also intend to create an integrated network of rivers to be used for cargo transport, and coupled with the development of their sea ports, the intention is to have goods entering France via its ports and not across land.

A parliamentary committee has recommended that the government appoint a minister specifically to deal with climate change, after its review of government policy revealed that departments are not coordinating properly to deal with the issue.

The Environmental Audit Committee said there had been a “decade of failure” to tackle Britain’s ever rising carbon emissions, and accused the government of not rising to the challenge.

On the plus side, it said, the government has created a cross-government Office of Climate Change and drafted the Climate Change Bill.

Well, whoopee-do! What a bunch of tossers. Repeat after me, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ANTHROPOMORPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE!

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stop using so-called fossil fuels as our main power source, so listen up if you are shouting at me for being a global warming heretic. Think about it … we build some small scale high temperature gas cooled pebble bed nuclear reactors with which we generate electricity. We use that electricity to desalinate sea water, power Maglev trains, goods delivery systems, and get this for a novel idea, make hydrogen by electrolysis. We pipe the hydrogen to the forecourts, and Honda’s proposed home hydrogen stations, where people can fill up their new hydrogen fuelled Honda cars.

Or, we could appoint a climate change minister and spend the next 20 years talking shit to each other instead.

David Bellamy, the British naturalist and nature educator, blasted global warming in his recent column in the Times.

“Am I worried about man-made global warming? The answer is ‘no’ and ‘yes’.

No, because the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction has come up against an ‘inconvenient truth’. Its research shows that since 1998 the average temperature of the planet has not risen, even though the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to increase.

Yes, because the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the questioning rigours of hard science and become a political cause. Those of us who dare to question the dogma of the global-warming doomsters who claim that C not only stands for carbon but also for climate catastrophe are vilified as heretics or worse as deniers.

I am happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up against dogma based on the bigotry of vested interests. But I don’t like being smeared as a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. The truth is that there are no facts that link the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming. Instead of facts, the advocates of man-made climate change trade in future scenarios based on complex and often unreliable computer models.”

“But the computer model – called ‘hockey stick’ – that predicted the catastrophe of a frying planet proved to be so bent that it ‘disappeared’ from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s armoury of argument in 2007. It was bent because the historical data it used to predict the future dated from only the 1850s, when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age. Little wonder that temperatures showed an upward trend.”

“Let’s turn to Al Gore’s doom-laden Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. First, what is the point of scaring the families of the world with tales that polar bears are heading for extinction? Last year Mitchell Taylor, of the US National Biological Service, stated that ‘of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.’

Why create alarm about a potential increase in the spread of malaria thanks to rising temperatures when this mosquito-borne disease was a major killer of people in Britain and northern Russia throughout the Little Ice Age?”

The answer, David, is that today’s environment lobby are basically genocidalists, especially Mr Gore. The rise in malaria isn’t caused by rising temperatures, but by their campaign for a ban on DDT. They press for a ban on the development of third world countries on the basis of their “carbon footprint,” and they encourage the use of food for energy, forcing the price of basic staples to a point where the worlds poorest can’t afford them.

They are running television advertising campaigns here to encourage us to stop using energy,  and encouraging the replacement of high energy flux density power generation, with low energy flux density power generation, such as wind turbines.

These people need to be challenged. Glad to see you back in the fight.