(Jan. 18, 2010) Who would have thought you couldn’t trust a search engine in America? Continue reading
W. R. Wansley
American Thinker
January 18, 2010
Who would have thought you couldn’t trust a search engine in America?
Back in 2005, the U.S. Justice Department asked several internet companies to supply data that would help in the development of law enforcement techniques that were intended to protect children from online indecency and worse. Because no identifiable individual information would be supplied, but only raw statistical data such as anonymous search requests and website addresses, all companies complied — except Google. Google sanctimoniously contended that its compliance would impose on the privacy of would-be molesters.
Google took a stand against censorship, saying such compliance to help the Child Online Protection Act would have a “chilling effect”. However, in 2006, Google quickly complied with blatant censorship in China, setting up a blacklist of forbidden sites not to be seen by Chinese citizens. It seems the “warming effect” of profits from China can outweigh the chilling effects of censorship. Now that China is hacking Google for information — and thereby stealing trade secrets — Google, like Claude Rains in Casablanca, is shocked! shocked! that it has been a party to censorship in China.
Now, Google’s pièce de résistance of hypocrisy: Climategate. In a January 16th article in the National Post entitled “Better off with Bing”, Lawrence Solomon documents a devastating statistical account of how Google censored news accounts of Climategate.
Has Google invested heavily in “green” anti global warming technologies? Google has close ties with Al Gore and Obama. Anyone looking for information on Climategate is directed to links critical of Climategate and no suggestions for it. Rather than doing injustice to the great work of Lawrence Solomon by trying to recount the specifics, I would direct you to the article itself. Better to cut and past the link as I would advise not using Google to look for it.
The British Broadcasting Corporation has put its weather forecasting contract out to tender – the first time since its radio broadcasts began in 1923 – after taking heat from the public for a string of embarrassingly inaccurate long-range weather forecasts. The UK Met Office, the government-owned meteorological department that has had the BBC contract for almost 90 years, is a partner with the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University of Climategate fame. CRU and the UK Met Office jointly provide the climate change data that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on.
The BBC’s decision comes amid one of the fiercest winters in decades that has left the country unprepared for the snow-related chaos it has seen. In August, the Met Office had forecast a mild winter. Last summer, the BBC had again been embarrassed: Thanks to the forecasts it had received from the UK Met, the BBC had warned its audience of an “odds-on barbecue summer” that instead was cool and rainy. In both cases, the BBC has faced outrage from a public that had been misled by the information the BBBC had provided it.
Many blame the UK Met Office’s abysmal forecasts record on a climate change bias. The BBC’s own climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, who for a decade had been a UK Met forecaster, believes the UK Met’s problem could stem from flawed computer models at its Hadley Centre, which provides data to the IPCC.
“Could it be that the Hadley supercomputer had developed a warm bias?” he wrote for the BBC yesterday, elaborating on a troubling possibility that has implications for the climate change debate. Last week, on the same subject, he wrote: “Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?”
The UK Met has also lost contracts to private sector firms in the UK that depend on accurate long-range forecasts, among them Marks & Spencer and Tesco.
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, January 18, 2010
(Jan. 16, 2010) Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors? Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
January 16, 2010
Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?
This week, Google announced an end to its long-standing collaboration with the Chinese Communists — it will no longer censor users inside China.
That’s good of it. Maybe Google will now also stop using its search engine to censor the rest of us, in the Western countries.
Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.
Despite Google’s motto of “Do No Evil,” it has long been controversial and suspected of evil-doing — and not just in its cooperation with China, or in protecting itself by hiding criticism of itself from unsuspecting Google users. In recent months, most of the evil-doing has focused on the Climategate scandal, the startling emails from the Climate Research Unit in the UK that show climate change scientists to be cooking the books.
For many weeks now, readers have been sending me emails describing how Google has been doing its best to hide information relating to Climategate, which has been the single biggest story on the Internet since the Climategate emails came to light on November 19. By Nov. 26, the term had gone viral and Google returned more results for “climategate” (10.4 million) than for “global warming” (10.1 million). As the Climate Scandal exploded, and increasing numbers of blog sites covered it, the number of web pages with Climategate continued to climb. On Dec. 7, Google’s search engine found 31.6 million hits for people who searched for “Climategate.”
Sometime around then, in early December, Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users. By Dec. 17, the number of climategate pages that a Google search found dropped by almost 10 million, to 22.2 million. One day later Google dropped its find by another 8 million pages, to 14.1 million. By Dec. 23, Google could find only 7.5 million hits and on Dec. 24 just 6 million. And yesterday, when I checked, Google reported a mere 1.8 million climategate pages.
Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million, where they have remained since.
Starting in late November, Google has been keeping the public in the dark about Climategate in other ways, too. Ordinarily, when people begin keying in their search terms, Google helpfully suggests the balance of their text, through an automatic feature it calls Google Suggests.
At the very beginning of the Climategate scandal, before it became huge, Google Suggests worked as advertised. If someone typed in c-l-i-, Google would have shown them “climategate” on a list of options. Many people, in fact, learned about Climategate this very way, because most major media outlets had not yet picked up on the scandal. As Climategate rose in intensity, the term also rose in prominence on the Google Suggest list — anyone keying in c-l-i would see “climategate” at the top of the list.
But suddenly in late November, for reasons known only to Google, Google often would not suggest “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i. Even c-l-i-m-a or c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t weren’t enough to solicit a suggestion. Bing, in contrast, did not and does not steer users away from climategate — it has consistently suggested “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i or even c-l.
For those whom Google can’t steer away from “climategate,” and who key in all 11 letters to learn about the eye-opening emails, Google goes the extra yard in keeping people in the dark — it dishes up a page that trivializes the scientific significance of climategate. Those who click on Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” after asking for “climategate” find themselves on a Wikipedia page entitled “Climatic Research Unit hacking incident” that downplays the content of the emails and focuses on the “unauthorised release of thousands of emails and other documents obtained through the hacking of a server,” the “illegal taking of data,” the “Law enforcement agencies [that] are investigating the matter as a crime,” and “the death threats that were subsequently made against climate scientists named in the emails.”
For those who don’t use Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” feature, Google presents them with this one-sided Wikipedia page as the first item in its search results. Wikipedia actually has a page called “Climategate” that contains damning information about the scientists caught up in the scandal but its own censors won’t let the public see it — anyone who tries to key in “Climategate” on the Wikipedia site will be instantly redirected to the Wikipedia-approved version of climategate, where the scandal is described as nothing more than “a smear campaign.”
Why would Google want to tamp down interest in climategate? Money and power could have something to do with it. Search for Google and its founders and you’ll see that they have made big financial bets on global warming through investments in renewable and other green technologies; that they have a close relationship with Al Gore, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is close to Barack Obama.
But search for Googlegate and you’ll also see that more than money is at stake. The accusations against Google of censorship are wide-spread, involving schemes to elect Barack Obama, attacks on Christianity (key in “Christianity is” and Google will suggest unflattering completions to the phrase), and political correctness (key in “Islam is” and nothing negative is suggested).
The bottom line? Google is as inscrutable as the Chinese, and perhaps no less corrupt. For safe searches, you’re best off with Bing.
Before the Copenhagen conference on climate change, many believed that carbon trading, already underway in the EU, would sweep the western world, with Australia being the next country carbon-trading country. After Copenhagen ended in chaos, it became clear that the U.S. wouldn’t adopt carbon markets and that Canada, which is determined to follow the U.S.’s lead, also would not.
Now, all bets are off in Australia, despite gung-ho Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has staked his reputation on pushing through carbon trading.
”I think there should be a delay in whatever we do until we have a clear picture of the best course,” Dick Warburton, head of the Labour government’s own Expert Advisory Committee on Emissions-Intensive Trade-Exposed Activities,
said in a surprise statement earlier today.
Even before Copenhagen, Australia’s seemingly irrevocable decision to implement its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a cap and trade system that had the support of the Australia’s Liberal Leader of the Opposition, had begun to unravel. In a surprise move, the Liberal leader
was ousted by seemingly fringe back benchers in favour of an outspoken climate change skeptic, Tony Abbott. The newly sceptical Opposition, in what was seen as a mere setback to the cap and trade scheme’s inevitable passage, then voted down the legislation in the Senate. Days later, the newly sceptical Liberals did surprisingly well in winning by-elections in Melbourne and Sydney.
And now, as the governing Labour party is pondering how to redraft its cap and trade legislation for reintroduction to parliament next month, Warburton is moving against it, saying that the country needs a proper understanding of the implications of climate change legislation before
proceeding. ”Chairmen and CEOs and the public have very poor knowledge of what the ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme] involves.” he stated, announcing he is organizing a round-table of corporate executives, government bureaucrats and experts to weigh the merits of carbon trading and to consider alternatives to it – in effect, a counter conference to the government’s expert advisory panel that he chaired last year.
“We need to get it right,” Warburton explains.
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, January 14, 2010
In regards to biofuels, I have gone on record for years that once we fully consider the impacts of ethanol—not just from corn, although corn ethanol is the worst of the ethanol options—it will become socially unacceptable to deal in ethanol at all. Biodiesel is a different story.
Biodiesel from palm oil should be a "no". But biodiesel from recycled waste oils and virgin canola and soy is okay—the biodiesel does not displace the food value of canola and oil, it uses oil after it is separated from the protein in the beans, so the food value can still go to the food market. Part of the reason for this difference is that we know how to sustainably harvest canola and soy using minimum tillage and multiple crop rotation practices.
However, we still do not know how to harvest corn at commercial scale using minimum impact methods.
All things considered, you really want to skip the alternative "alcohols" or sugar-based fuels and stick with oil. There are many reasons, including the above. Another is that oil-based fuels can incorporate large recycled content, while you don’t put recycled content in alcohol-based fuels. Vegetable-based oils can be blended with mineral-based oils at any point in the supply chain. Not true for alcohol/sugar-based biofuels.
More importantly, the diesel engine and power train remains a better platform for plug-in electric hybrid technology development than the gasoline engine platform. So we should be thinking oil, clean diesel, and diesel engine platforms for innovation.
In the longer term, I think production of biodiesel from algae is likely to prove the big breakthrough—and I put that within 5 years, not 20. Algae-biodiesel reactors will be built at diesel-oriented oil refineries. The biodiesel reactor uses waste heat and CO2 from the diesel refinery in the algae-to-biodiesel production process, and the biodiesel is run through the refinery’s hydro cracker to ensure that it will perform in cold climates just like petroleum-based biodiesel. Then we can put 50% biodiesel blends in EXISTING TRUCKS, let alone new diesel electric hybrids—conventional gasoline combustion engines can tolerate no more than 7.7%, gross, ethanol.
The best existing diesel-electric hybrid (made by Opel/Vauxhall) uses the diesel engine only to recharge the batteries—not for direct power—and has a range over 740 km and much lower GHGs than the newest prototype gasoline hybrid.
It makes NO sense to dedicate resources to develop gasoline additives. We should be thinking about how to shift the gasoline market to clean diesel and diesel electric hybrid engines and power train technology.
One key to getting there is to get the sulphur content in diesel fuels down to 10 parts per million from the existing regulated 15 parts per million. This makes inexpensive catalytic converters and fine particulate traps workable on diesel-powered vehicles, so that we get air pollution reductions at the same time we get GHG reductions at relatively low incremental fuel and vehicle costs.
The issue for cellulose-based ethanol is the diesel fuel that has to be consumed to move the cellulose feed stocks to processing plants. Another difference between biodiesel and ethanol is that biodiesel plants can be designed to hit economies of scale at relatively small plant sizes. So we can locate the plants close to the feedstock supplies. Ethanol production usually requires very high production volumes to hit economies of scale. So we have to ship biomass feed stocks large distances to the plants.
Having said that, I think there might be one (only one) BC-based ethanol production technology that could hit good numbers with small- scale plants. Whether or not I am correct about the one BC example, small scale economies is what we have to be looking out for in all biomass-based fuel alternatives. It simply costs way too much (in $s and fuel) to ship waste wood, which is only 50% carbon at best, long distances to make transportation fuels.
Probably one of the largest problems is that some decision-makers still do not know the difference between ethanol (what I call "alcohol" or "sugar-based" fuels, to real scientists’ disdain) and biodiesel ("Oil"). I tried to encourage then-NR Minister Lunn to differentiate between the two some years ago. In that regard, I think I failed.
I recently entered into a dialogue with a Canadian business journalist about lessons Canada can learn from European energy and environmental market regulations.
My principal point is that while many Canadian academics and environmentalists misrepresent, often quite unintentionally, the impacts of post-1990 European energy tax and cap and trade measures, they appear to have missed the VERY important positive story of District Heating in Europe. I think this is largely because the lion’s share of European District Heating Infrastructure was fully developed by 1985 and has nothing to do with post-Rio/UNFCCC decision-making.
One of the key resulting failures is that we are now planning to shut down and decommission coal-fired power plants that are rarely retired in Europe. In Europe, the same plants are worked through three phases rather than simply shut down. In phase one, they make only electricity. In phase two they co-generate steam (which, in Europe, is usually condensed into hot water to supply a District Heating network) as well as producing electricity. In phase three (after 45+ years of operation), they cut back their electricity production and continue to make steam to supply District Heating.
An aged coal-fired power generating unit might operate at an efficiency rate as low as 30%—meaning the energy value of its power output equates to 30% of the energy value of the fuel fed into the generating plant. Fossil and or biofuels are combusted to make steam, which is then pushed through turbines or other processes to make electricity.
The average GHGs per MWh of electricity output is usually in the 1.1 to 1.3 TCO2e/MWh net output range. But the aged boilers often make steam/hot at 85% efficiency.
On average, 10,000 pounds of steam converts to hot water that displaces about 1 MWh-equivalent of electricity or natural gas demand. When we take away the step of converting the steam into electricity, and directly use the steam or condensed steam to supply district heating, the GHGs per MWh of useful heating value delivered to customers can range anywhere between 0.4 and 0.8 GHGs per displaced MWh-equivalent of electricity or natural gas demand.
Using aged boilers to supply heat into the district heating network can be a very cost-effective transition in a GHG reduction strategy. The key is the distance of the boilers from the homes, commercial offices and industry that can use the steam/hot water.
Denmark has been able to develop hot water recovery, transmission and recycling systems at a retail cost to Danish consumers in the CAD$0.06/ to CAD$0.10/displaced MWh retail price range. This is significantly less than the CAD$0.46/MWh average price for electricity that is currently charged Danish households.
The Danes have found that they can pay off capital and operating costs in a network that carries hot water as far as 55 kilometers from steam/heat sources to retail customers. Steam is more efficient than hot water over short distances; hot water is more efficient than steam over longer distances.
Note that the Danish District Heating network was almost fully developed by 1985, when Danish retail (taxes included) power prices were still below CAD$0.12/MWh.
The reporter was on his way to Copenhagen and decided, as a result of our conversations, to set up meetings with Danish administrators and operators of the Danish District Heating network, which currently supplies hot water and displaces 60% of the nation’s previous electricity and natural gas demand to heat space and hot water.
(Jan 10, 2010) Climate change is real and man-made, explains University of Waterloo professor Qin-Bin Lu, author of a new study published this week in the peer-reviewed journal, Physics Reports. Continue reading
(Jan. 8, 2010) Clearly, ancient Egyptians didn’t get the memo about lead poisoning. Their eye makeup was full of the stuff. Although today we know that lead can cause brain damage and miscarriages, the Egyptians believed that lead-based cosmetics protected against eye diseases. Now, new research suggests that they may have been on to something. Continue reading
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