I pass up and down the driveway to the Triumphal Arch regularly and pass the cattle in the field, presently this quiet and tranquil herd of cattle is made up of around 30 or so animals, I’ve never counted them so I may be adrift on the numbers, I’ll ask the farmer next time we meet! It would be hard to find a more rural idyll, the lush pasture being grazed by the cows and their young offsprings along with the bull, a tremendous creature, the magnificent trees, and the cow pats! Here in a nutshell is a complete eco system that pre-dates all the modern legislative nightmare which is involved in owning cattle these days, if it were not for the plastic identifiers in the animals ears you could easily imagine that you were in any previous period you cared to choose. The cow pats are where I return, because these are involved with the internal processes of the animals that seemingly, according to Lord Stern, are the culprits of the production of Methane into the atmosphere, which will likely bring about Armageddon. You have to wonder what drives these people, how utterly incredulous that a person who holds a high office in the establishment can wander into the realms of such stupidity.
Lets consider Parlington Park in respect of his request to reduce our meat consumption, and to take on more vegetarian produce. Firstly we kill these noble beasts, not as we do today after a few years for beef, but we eliminate the species. No more leather sofas, and any number of other bi-products of the animal carcass. I’m not sure where we stand on milk, cheese and other dairy products, I’m confused! However it goes further by a mile. No one can walk across the grassy pasture because its been turned over to wheat or some such other crop. You might as well eliminate your dogs, good people of Aberford as there will be NO recreational space to wash away the troubles of the day, but lets suppose they don’t plant a crop, what then, within a few years it will be a wilderness of weeds. We can’t cut it unless done manually as this would be more CO² into the atmosphere. This would be the scene in many parts of the UK. I suspect that as usual we are trying to solve a problem by addressing the symptoms not looking to the cause.
I like to think that I am reasonably intelligent and can sense a lie when I hear one, so that’s why I am a skeptic about this climate change scare, remember skeptism is the basis for all proper science. Recently the Science Museum put up a section on their web site about anthropogenic climate change its available here. But they offer no evidence just statements, which have no facts attached. Sound bite science! How this is supposed to support the theory I don’t know, and remember that is what it is a THEORY not a LAW like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (More on this in a later post).
I did read an interesting article by a highly reputed Polish scientist who provided a written statement to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in March 2004. Available here. He had undertaken to look at the evidence for past levels of CO² in the atmospere, all such evidence is arrived at by proxies, i.e. things which were around at the time which could still hold evidence of the past air composition, such as ice cores from the various places on earth where vast tracks of ice are to be found, such as the artic. He discovered that the process of drilling the cores has a significant effect on the samples of ice brought up in the core drill. Essentially the samples were polluted by the drilling activity and therefore did not provide what in scientific terms is regarded as a “Closed System”. The formation of gas hydrates or clathrates is one example of the processes at work in the cores which disrupt the results as these decompose after the reduced pressure is created on releasing the ice from its deep high pressure environment, and therefore change the composition of the air samples, rendering it inaccurate.
Significantly his study of stomatal frequency in fossil leaves from Holocene lake deposits in Denmark, showed that 9400 years ago CO² atmospheric level was 333 ppmv, and 9600 years ago 348 ppmv, these results falsify the concept of stabilized and low CO² air concentration until the advent of industrial revolution, in the eighteenth century of around 280ppmv. Today CO² is around 380ppmv (parts per million by volume). Which remember is 380/1,000,000 or 0.038% in total, I believe man made emmissions account for less than 20% of the total volume of CO². Therefore 20% of 0.038% = 0.0076% These are very small numbers particularly when contrasted against water vapour which is universally agreed to be the far greater “greenhouse”, gas.
Thus if we don’t know what the starting point is how do we know where we are today! The whole thing is very bad science.