A Few Morsels > UPDATED

Something to think about the next time you have you grab for the Briers Classic Double Churned Cookies and Cream ice cream:

...Do they also disagree with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist"? He says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases like infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year.

Nature designed us as carnivores, but what does nature know about nature? Meat has been designated a menace. Among the 51 exhortations in Time magazine's "global warming survival guide" (April 9), No. 22 says a BMW is less responsible than a Big Mac for "climate change," that conveniently imprecise name for our peril. This is because the world meat industry produces 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, more than transportation produces. Nitrous oxide in manure (warming effect: 296 times greater than that of carbon) and methane from animal flatulence (23 times greater) mean that "a 16-ounce T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate."

Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity-guzzling refrigeration and four gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks.

I love cool words like 'rort' Aussies use to punch up the point they are making. This article is worth the read:

...Professor Carter suggests that the "global warming" alleged by climate alarmists to have been caused by the accumulation of human-sourced CO2 in the atmosphere relies on surface thermometer records, whose accuracy he doubts.

Rather, he writes, the most accurate depiction of atmospheric temperature over the past 25 years has come from satellite measurements, and those indicate an absence of significant global warming since 1979 - the very period in which human carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing rapidly.

"The satellite data signal not only the absence of substantial human-induced warming, by recording similar temperatures in 1980 and 2006, but also provide an empirical test of the greenhouse hypothesis as understood by the public - a test that the hypothesis fails."

UPDATE: More clear thinking from down under:

“It is extraordinarily difficult to argue that human-induced carbon dioxide has any effect at all,” he said.

Prof Plimer added that as the planet was already at the maximum absorbance of energy of carbon dioxide, any more would have no greater effect.

There had even been periods in history with hundreds of times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than now with “no problem”, he said.