Using the Dead to Fight AGW

29 11 2008

by John Goetz

In what seems to be a script straight from a Monty Python classic, the good folks of Santa Coloma de Gramenet in Spain seem to have found a rather novel use for the dead: as a tool in the fight against global warming.

From the TimesOnline
November 28, 2008
by Graham Keeley in Barcelona

Spanish graveyard new front in the fight against global warming

Solar panels are installed in cemetery

Solar panel in Santa Coloma

Solar panel in Santa Coloma

A graveyard in Spain has become an unlikely front in the fight against global warming, with hundreds of black panels placed on top of mausoleums providing year-round power for homes.

The 462 panels produce 124,374 kilowatts of electricity, enough to supply 60 homes for a year in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona. The exorbitant price of land in the densely populated satellite city inspired a solar energy company to propose using one of the last remaining available plots of land – the cemetery.

Conste-Live Energy and the local council spent three years persuading relatives of those interred and near-by residents that the unusual proposal would benefit the living without demeaning the dead. “The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors is to generate clean energy for new generations,” Esteve Serret, a company director, said.

The panels cost €720,000 (£612,500) to install and each year will keep about 62 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Mr Serret said.

“This is not much, but it will do something to help combat global warming,” said Bartomeu Muñoz, the Mayor of Santa Coloma. The glinting blue-grey panels are fixed on top of mausoleums, which in Spain hold five layers of coffins.

The panels, which face south to soak up maximum sunshine, were turned on last week after three years of planning. Santa Coloma is so densely populated that all 124,000 inhabitants live within a 4sq km area. Putting solar panels on coffins was a tough sell, said Antoni Fogué, a city councillor. “Let’s say we heard things like, ‘They’re crazy. Who do they think they are? What a lack of respect’,” he said.

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Categories : Uncategorized

Statistician debunks Gore’s climate linkage to the collapse of the Mayan civilisation

29 11 2008

http://www.myanmars.net/myanmar-history/mayan-civilization2.jpg

Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

This is an email I recently received from statistician Dr. Richard Mackey who writes:

The following appeared on Gore’s blog of Nov 19, 2008:

Looking Back to Look Forward

Looking Back to Look Forward November 19, 2008 : 3:04 PM

A new study suggests the Mayan civilization might have collapsed due to environmental disasters:

These models suggest that as ecosystems were destroyed by mismanagement or were transformed by global climatic shifts, the depletion of agricultural and wild foods eventually contributed to the failure of the Maya sociopolitical system,’ writes environmental archaeologist Kitty Emery of the Florida Museum of Natural History in the current Human Ecology journal.

As we move towards solving the climate crisis, we need to remember the consequences to civilizations that refused to take environmental concerns seriously.

If you haven’t read already read it, take a look at Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse.”

This is a most curious reference.

It means that Gore is advocating the abandonment of the IPCC doctrine and barracking for the study and understanding of climate dynamics that ignores totally the IPCC/AWG doctrine and focuses on all the other variables, especially how climate dynamics are driven by atmospheric/oceanic oscillations, the natural internal dynamics of the climate system and the role of the Sun in climate dynamics.

Brian Fagan in Floods, Famines and Emperors  El Nino and the fate of civilisations  Basic Books 1999, shows that the Maya collapse, whilst having complex political, sociological, technological and ecological factors, was largely driven by the natural atmospheric/oceanic oscillations of ENSO and NAO.  The book is one of three by Brian Fagan, Prof of Anthropology UC Santa Barbara, that documents how natural climate variations, ultimately driven by solar activity, have given rise to the catastrophic collapse of civilisations.  The book has a chapter on the Mayan civilisation which collapsed around 800 to 900 AD.

Here are some quotes from his book: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, climate_change

Al Gore does Oprah – was anybody watching?

29 11 2008

A guest post by: Russ Steele from NCWatch

Green truth

We can only hope the most people in the US are shopping on Black Friday and not watching the Oprah Winfrey Show today.  Al Gore has brought his global warming propaganda machine to share with Oprah.  You can find the details on Oprah’s web page.  Here are some of the topics that Gore is pushing:

Classic Gore:

“Some of the leading scientists are now saying we may have as little as 10 years before we cross a kind of point-of-no-return, beyond which it’s much more difficult to save the habitability of the planet in the future,” Gore says.

Yes, but Al you have been saying that for over ten years and we are still here. And in the last ten years the global temperatures stopped rising and are now in decline.

uah_october_2008-520

Click for a larger image

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Categories : media, ridiculae