Guest post by Indur M. Goklany
Lately, North Korea has been very much in the news. Its population—or should I say, “captive population”—greets the passing of the baton from one ruler to another in the same spirit as “Kim is dead, long live Kim!” probably because they are unaware of the following satellite photos. Many readers here have probably encountered them previously.
East Asia at night. Top photo from 1994-95 which outlines North Korea is from MSNBC at http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/19/9564314-satellites-document-north-koreas-dark-ages?pc=25&sp=25. Bottom photo is from 2009. Source: http://agora. ex.nii.ac.jp/~kitamoto/research/rs/stable-lights.html.en.
Not only do the photographs illustrate the lack of economic development in North Korea, they show that it has one of the lightest carbon footprints in the world. And the various indicators of human well-being reflect that dark reality, as shown in the following table.
It wasn’t always thus. In the early 1950s, to the extent data are available, the two countries were about equal in terms of economic development and human well-being. In fact, in 1960, according to the World Bank data, North Korea’s life expectancy was marginally higher than in the South (55.2 yrs vs. 53.0 yrs). Of course, the North’s data may have been fluffed up a little bit by its government before being adopted by the World Bank, but I don’t know for sure.
But over time, South Korea’s freer economic system pulled it ahead. Then, the loss of external support because of the collapse of the Soviet Union turned North Korea into a basket case in the 1990s (see the following figure). Finally, the South also became more democratic and its economic and social systems became more transparent. The consequences are evident in the above photographs and the following figure.
Per capita GDP and per capita CO2 emissions, 1950-2008. Sources: Maddison (2008) and World Bank (2011).
The photographs and the figure are, among other things, also a stark warning of the dangers of excessive zeal in limiting a country’s carbon footprint.
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No light pollution, no inequality, little electricity, few cars:
why that’s Green Heaven for sure, anti-natalist to the max.
Consider that most of NK’s exports are weapons and weapons technology…
The socialists will of course blame it all on the imperialist running dogs in the United States.
Looks like a textbook case of “Sustainable Development” to me.
Zero development can be sustained forever. And think of all the saved maintenance costs!
“Kim is dead, long live Kim!”
————————————
Some are Chosen to lead.
you have to feel sorry for the people, they are kept utterly ignorant of what is happening in the World. This of course makes me even more angry when in Australia information is freely available but the population is too lazy to inform themselves. Oh and a tip for Andrew Wilke, why would you waste so much time on trying to protect an idiot that knows the machine they play is programmed to take money off you, Andrew! someone will remove the money from these people why waste your time?
The blinding glare of Utopia.
To make things worse, look at the top picture — there *are* lights — they all are at the perimeter of the country, all facing hungrily outward. The interior of the country is dark, dark, dark. In a sane economy, the lights would either be distributed throughout the country, or at least be concentrated at various interior locations.
Very sad, indeed.
North Korea is clearly the CO2 free paradise that the IPCC want for the whole world. I know, lets move the UN to Pyongyang and let those bureaucrats enjoy what they want for everyone else.
Kim might have been the only politician who cared for polar bears.
This is a testament to the inhuman scope of the moral and ethical crimes committed against the people of North Korea by their government. North Korea is the purest example of the opposite of capitalism in the world today – statism, collectivism, “social justice” and big government taken to their inevitable conclusion. This satellite photo is what I think of every time I hear the false claim “capitalists have no heart”.
Bob Brown and the Greens dream for Australia right there people.
Actually, that is just a line someone drew on the map to indicate the border.
Anyway, looks like NK is a “world leader” in the fight against light pollution ….
This is going to sound callous, but bear with me.
The ruling entity in North Korea is kept in place by the civilized world. We feed his hungry with aid since short and stupid, (or whatever the new corpse wanted to call himself when he was alive) focused the entirety of his effort on being a malcontent and developing weapons. If the food dried up, all he had to do was rattle his cage and we (the civilized world) would pony up the goodies.
I’m not even convinced that North Korea ever attained fission in their bomb “tests.”
A year or so before the first test, maybe more, the Littlest Emperor very nearly died in an explosion that happened very soon after his train had passed through there. Rumors of an assassination attempt ran rampant. In all likelihood, it was just a run of the mill accident. Things like that happen when you produce large quantities of ammonium nitrate.
Ammonium nitrate is a key fertilizer, and very useful in an agricultural society. It’s also handy in the manufacture of explosives.
What follows is conjecture. (mine and possibly wrong)
This explosion probably gave the little emperor an idea. Take a mine, and pack it full of ANFO (the same stuff used in Oklahoma City). If it’s deep enough, and there is enough of it, it will look like a nuke. As far as I know, no radio active material was ever picked up by sensors from that first blast.
The world poo-pooed the fizzled nuke for this reason. So, blast number two incorporated radioactive material from the reactor(s) that he has. This material was subsequently detected in neighboring countries.
People still marvel at how you can go from no nuclear warhead capability to a highly advanced controlled small yield version in just one test. One test that ostensibly not achieve fission.
Am I wrong? It’s possible. I don’t know what isotopes were actually detected, and some of them are specific to the type of reaction (explosive verses reactor). That is the biggest weak-point of my idea.
So… the world is now better that the little emperor slowly decomposes. I seriously doubt that his replacement is going to be any better.
How scarey is this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/20/un-climate-change-peacekeeping
This North Korea evening satellite photo is exactly what the Warmist would love to accomplish for the entire world. A very dark future indeed.
I just hope those South Koreans occasionaly think about and appreciate what American military men and women have done for them.
Something we Americans could do as well.
If you’re a vet, THANK YOU!
GeoLurking, just him having a reactor that can produce plutonium is enough of a threat. Plutonium is one of the most poisonous substances on the planet. Its lethal dose is unbelievable small. You don’t have to use it in a nuclear bomb for it to be a threat. A regular bomb that held a quantity of plutonium would be enough to aerosol the sample, spreading it over a significant area. Anyone who inhaled any of the aerosol would face possible death, and certainly illness. For years, this type of “nuclear” threat has been the bigger fear of anti-terrorist organizations rather than a full nuclear device. The general processing and machining needed to produce a nuclear device is much easier to detect than just someone acquiring a sample mass of plutonium.
Perfect place to measure temperature change unaffected by urban heat effect.
Imagine the following headline:
“The Kim il Sung correction (KISC) removes 0,5 degree celcius from GISS anomally”.
Cry your eyes out for the Dear Leader. Cry with me!
Dead? No o no! Cruel world, undo this blow, this indignity! This outrage!
On his bier he lies now. He rests. The cooling fan wafts a solemn good-bye through the magnificent pompadour, the lion’s mane framing the Roman profile. Good-bye!
His Italian platform shoes? Empty—never again to click on the marble tiles of the Great Revolutionary Hall. Be still, yet set your heart aghast to the cruel stillness.
The Great Porn Collection stands idle on its extraordinarily long shelf. Asia Carrera, cry with me. Your honeyed skin will ne’er again fog a hero’s eyeglasses! Nikki Coxx, bow your head (but not too far) for your tush has danced its final jig on the People’s screen.
The exquisite, near-mint DVD of Titanic The Movie, barely watched for the tears it brought to that noble face—who will see you now? Who will cry over the boy wonder Di Caprio?
The world cries: re-run this life!
His heroic endorsement of the Dark Skies Initiative—the glorious twinkling above—THAT is his legacy.
The Horsehead Nebula is yours, O North Korean, o peasant, o soldier, to feast on with your naked eye.
No bowl of rice, no kim chee, no Bib Bam Bap, can match the rings of Saturn, outside the hut, by the hollow song of the rusted tractor.
Ideal location for the next IPCC COP junket. They can demonstrate to all who attend the benefits of success in a de-carbonized world.
It’s a good thing that nobody on the planet who matters takes the Guardian seriously.
All reactors in use create plutonium. In fact, by the time fuel rods are removed from a reactor, most of the fission is being supplied by plutonium. A fuel rod has only enough U-235 to run the fission reaction for a small amount of time. During that time, neutrons from the U-235 reaction change the natural U-238 to P-239 through the addition of a neutron. So the non-fissionable natural U-238 is converted to fissionable P-239. Interestingly, the longer you leave it in there, the more P-240 you produce. Sometimes P-239 doesn’t split, it absorbs a neutron and becomes P-240. P-240 is poison to a bomb, you don’t want any P-240 anywhere NEAR a bomb. P-240 is nearly impossible to separate from P-239, too.
The problem is that P-240 can undergo spontaneous fission and you don’t want something in a bomb that will undergo spontaneous fission.
Actually, if you read “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste” it will explain all of that:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste
Read that, have your kids read it, make sure your elected officials read it. This is what China is doing right now. Bill Gates is working with China right now on building fast neutron reactors for recycling fuel.
Some watermelon will find something beautiful to say about North Korea along the lines that its current condition is all the west’s fault. However it is clear from all the night satellite shots that there is a strong correlation between abundant energy and a society’s level of development.
It probably helps the NK regime that life-long malnutrition severely reduces IQ.