Regular articles are listed below this first one. This one tells you what this blog is about.

The purpose of this blog is to repeatedly expose the single most important and damaging issue facing human kind. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN TO SEE INDIVIDUAL POSTS.

That issue is the phenomenon of Peak Oil. It is just one manifestation of the more fundamental issue of the limits to growth. As M.King Hubbert said - "the world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything, whether it is oil consumption or grasshoppers". "Peak Oil" is not about 'when the oil runs out', that is a long way off. Indeed, most of the oil currently underground will still be there when we can no longer get any out.

The key point about Peak Oil, which is the moment after which there cannot be an increase in oil production, is that it is the point when the game changes. From then on, if you want more oil, I have to have less. It is already happening. Oil producing countries are keeping the oil for their own future generations. Demand increases inexorably while production has not increased to any worthwhile extent for a decade or more.

North Sea oil production is declining by double-digit percentages annually. Over 60 of the world's biggest oil producers are in decline. Human population continues to grow exponentially, as does human-kind's effects on resource depletion, pollution, and overall quality of life.

I am especially concerned that the influential media are disproportionately influenced by those in power - politicians and big industry. 'Twas ever thus. A classic case is the quite fantastical exposure of the completely unproven hypothesis of CO2 and anthropogenic global warming. Are you aware that 31,000 scientists (of whom 9,000 are PhDs) have signed a declaration that the man-made global warming hypothesis is nonsense? That is almost fifteen times the number who have been effectively paid by governments to say that a) global warming exists, and b) it's our fault. Folks, there is no consensus.

This preposterous and political, not scientific thrust, allied to the exponential growths referred to, is underpinning a vast array of extremely poor policy decisions by global politicians.

Our UK democratic system is proving to be poor at facilitating sufficiently agile and strategically cogent decisions by our full-time professional politicians who's sole raison d'etre is to KEEP the jobs they have, rather than DO the jobs they have. This is leading the west in particular and humankind in general to head in the wrong directions.

Examples of this, are the UK's transport policy, which is leading to further road building, more airport runways, and less public transport, is based on the quite absurd thesis that oil will cost no more than $75 per barrel until 2020 at the earliest. It is currently $130+ per barrel. Plus the rush for wind-generated electrical power which is only being facilitated by the transference of huge amounts of money from ordinary citizens to massive power companies. In fact the biggest subsidy ever given by the UK government, in history.

Much of my concern stems from the now proven trends identified and quantified by the authors of "The Limits to Growth", the 30 year update. A publication I strongly recommend you to read, more than once. These are issues we should ALL be deeply concerned about.

Bob Valentine Trueman

“On the Trail of The Lonesome Pine”. – or why you shouldn’t believe in “Global Warming”.

The BBC's programme last night makes this post (written some time ago) rather timely.

The body of good science now arrayed against the notion of global warming, man-made or otherwise, simply continues to burgeon.

The phrase “Climate Change” has now become a proxy for “Global Warming”.

“Global Warming” is itself a phrase which has now become synonymous with “Man-Made Global Warming”. Both of these have been made in the minds of most people to equate with “something bad”.

The very name of “The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) is very clever. It puts into the unconscious mind of every casual reader, the very idea that “Climate Change” exists – well of course it does – but that this is a Bad Thing.

To prove that it is a Bad Thing the IPCC took the wholly pernicious and highly dubious work of just a very few climate scientists with an axe to grind, and has suffused global media with it. This, despite the fact that it is insupportable, and wickedly distorted.

Why does it matter? It matters because your government is making a wide array of quite ridiculous policy decisions about energy production and supply, taxation, so-called bio-fuels and the like all based on this nonsense. Do not dismiss this statement; if it is true – if I am right – this will affect you a great deal more than “global warming” will.

Readers may be interested to learn that the world this year is almost as warm as it was seventy years ago. It is not as warm as it was some seven hundred years ago. Over the past many thousands of years the earth has been both cooler and warmer than it is today. The cause was not man-made CO2, and the fluctuations as you would expect were good for some, and not for others.

The IPCC started the whole phoney business – upon which our politicians are basing policy decisions of immense and possibly irreversible proportions – by issuing a document they have since quietly and in a most humiliating way, disposed of. Since then they have relied upon the already-rolling bandwagon to do their work for them.

I refer to the infamous, absolutely infamous, “hockey stick” graph of global temperature change.

A small cabal of climate scientists including Hansen, Mann, Amman, and others, ably abetted by people like Sir John Houghton and friends, produced this graph. Al Gore massively publicised it, in order to persuade the general public (who have no hope directly of countering it because they have none of the requisite knowledge). Also, to persuade politicians likewise, that all of a sudden man-released CO2 is responsible for a catastrophic and massive global temperature rise that will destroy crops, flood immense areas of land, and generally lead to disaster.

It has not happened of course. In some places on earth the temperature has risen recently. In others it has fallen. Last year, 2007, the global temperature fell both faster and by just short of the amount that it had risen in the previous 100 years. 100 years’ worth of rise, eliminated in one year. Did they tell you this? No.

They have repeatedly drawn the attention of the public to melting Arctic sea ice. They have not mentioned that wind changes have blown the sea ice further south than usual, which is very probably why it melted. They have not drawn your attention to the fact that in recent months Antarctic sea ice has very much increased.

The Lonesome Pines

In order to know if the earth’s temperature is really rising dangerously, you would need to know what it used to be, and how much fluctuation there has been. Since thermometers have not been around for long, and records don’t go back very far, the IPCC needed what are called “proxies” – things you can study which might substitute for temperature measurements.

In 1998, in order to help develop the now absolutely notorious “Hockey Stick Graph”, three scientists called Mann, Bradley and Hughes – men who were not dendro-chronologists – selected some tree ring data in order to prove their point. Note carefully the word “selected”. The real tree ring scientists had already clearly stated that these data could not be used in this way – they were simply insufficient and would lead to statistically erroneous results.

However, M,B and H used them anyway. It helped them to get their graph the shape they wanted it. The data set they used is called the Gaspé “northern treeline” series.

The data commences in 1404. So – how many trees were involved. Are you ready for this? The data begins in 1404, but the chronology is based on one tree up to 1421 and two trees up to 1447.

These two trees, have manifested occasional and in some cases recent, slightly more rapid growth phases than at other times. This is almost certainly caused by local CO2 increases, and not by temperature changes: be careful, the two things are not the same.

However, Mann et al included these two trees in a very clever and arcane statistical way, and this is what made their graph the shape they wanted it. Take these two trees out of it, and the graph becomes real, but that is not what they wanted.

"We know that when you are making a reconstruction of the historic temperature from tree rings, you shouldn't use bristlecone pines (BCPs). This was the advice of the US National Academy of Sciences who observed that these species are thought to be prone to CO2 fertilisation - which is to say that increased growth might be due to more CO2 in the air, rather than temperature."

Of course the IPCC doesn't care about this and uses BCPs all the time, most notoriously in the "Hockey Stick" graph.if you don't use any tree rings in your reconstruction, you don't get a hockey stick at all - in fact the medieval warm period looks warmer than the present.

The Medieval Warm Period lasted some 300 years. The earth was much warmer during that period. The IPCC and it cohorts found this very inconvenient. So inconvenient (and a truth!) that one of their leading “scientists” emailed a genuine dendro-chronologist whom he mistakenly took for someone who, like himself, was prepared to lie and “fiddle the figures”, to say that (and I quote) “We must get rid (by statistical manipulation) of the Medieval Warm Period. (My italicised insert).

He said this because in the event of being unable to get rid of it, the graph would not be a hockey stick shape, and if it isn’t, then CO2 induced global warming is NOT occurring, and none of the careers / policies / and profits will be sustainable.

It is not occurring, and one hopes they are not sustainable.

I exhort you, most strongly, do not simply accept all the hype. Go out and make some enquiries of your own. That is very important.

Bob Valentine Trueman

ECONOMIC FORECASTING AND OTHER CRYSTAL GAZING

The latest Economic Review from HSBC (Issue 49 Summer 2008) is a rather disappointing document. It has much in common with modern weather forecasts in that it is largely concerned with yesterday; or in this case yesteryear. Odd for a “forecast”.

Three fourths of its chart on the back page – “The Economy at a Glance” is 2006, and 7 and 8. One can only hope that its reports of the economy in the past are more accurate than is often the case with our weather forecasters, who seldom seem to get yesterday right. As for tomorrow . . . the 2009 figures are clearly guesswork, and indeed their economist Mr Turner, responsible for the Review, advises that all economic forecasts should carry a health warning in EMBOLDENED CAPITAL LETTERS.

That being the case, frankly what is the point? The forecast only stretches into next year anyway, which is but four months away, and is clearly not something upon which it would be wise to rely. Perhaps like our climate advisers while they can’t get tomorrow right, they can tell you what the year 2080 will be like.

What is perhaps more significant, is that nowhere in this Economic Review is the pivotal issue of the age addressed. Namely that by the end of this century “Petroleum Man” will have disappeared. He is unlikely to be sorely missed. The process has already started; it must have, even Gordon Brown seems to have noticed something might be up.

Whilst publicly stating that there is enough oil in the world to keep all the key economies expanding (which is nonsense) he also has spoken of The Third Oil Shock. The oxymoronic nature of his utterances appears to have escaped both him and his energy minister Malcolm Wicks. It also apparently escaped Alistair Darling who has just averred that “no one could have foreseen the current credit crunch and impending slump”. ? I receive a daily newsletter which has been foretelling of the inevitability of this
collapse, for at least three years. Anybody could have seen it coming, and many did.

The first our Chancellor apparently got to hear about it was when he read a newspaper while on holiday in the Mediterranean recently. Frankly, if we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer incapable of seeing this, with his manifold economic advisers, why have a chancellor.

Mr Brown himself has a penchant for selling stuff off cheap while he has an abundance of it. He sold off a huge percentage of Britain’s gold when the price was as low as it has ever been since 1900. His immediate predecessors set a precedent he was happy to follow with Britain’s oil. While we were net exporters we sold it off about as cheaply as we could. Now it is expensive, though not certainly by future standards, we have to import it.

From an economics point of view, the essential feature of this situation is that our balance of payments cannot but worsen drastically, as wealth is transferred from developed economies such as ours to those of the oil producing nations. This will weaken the pound inexorably and progressively. That will lead to import-led inflation if only because the only foodstuff in which we are self-sufficient is wheat, and agriculture in any case is totally dependent upon oil and gas.

That is of course if the oil producing nations do not decide to stop letting us have it. Our own oil production since 1999 has been in the process of halving every ten years. All bar a very few producers in the world are in a similar boat, at a slightly slower rate for some of them, but not all. They may decide it would be better not to emulate Britain, and to hang on to it for themselves. I would, if were them.

It is high time for us to stop chasing “growth”. It is in any case a pointless exercise. Growth was only possible because of fossil fuel exploitation and except for coal, those days are over. And now the idiots won’t let us use our coal because they claim to believe the preposterous global warming scam. Our populations grew because of fossil fuels. Our health improved because of it. We have been able to feed our burgeoned populations because of it.

More insidious however has been the grossly unequal distribution of the wealth created by it. Federico Pareto, in the mid-19^th Century was able to show this would be inevitable. A very small sector of our societies has been able to expropriate almost all of the wealth. Money has been the be-all-and-end-all.

Once the banks realised that they could lend more than they had, and rely on tomorrow’s growth to bale them out, the financial system became essentially unstable. It could only be a matter of time.

One good thing, and this is in no way a “forecast”, just perhaps a possibility, is that it may be but a short time now before money will not be what matters. Owning a large car, or a large tractor, or too many airport runways, will not be very functional once you cannot afford enough of the rapidly dwindling fuel upon which they rely. For millennia, having the physical resources for life, health and safety was what mattered.

Our society is moving, inexorably, and because of natural and un-alterable limits to growth, towards a world in which only the important things will matter. Food, shelter, safety and maybe, just maybe, one another. Who knows? Certainly not me, and certainly not the economic forecasters.

© Bob Valentine Trueman

"...discussions in the Ukraine over (gas) transit costs could impact the price of current supplies. For the UK which has built an infrastructure based on cheap gas this is a bleak picture indeed."

This apparently inoccuous report - almost a throw-away line in the news story - is very scary indeed, coming as it does on the day when the BBC reported this morning that EDF (in effect the French Government) has decided that it won't build any nuclear power stations for us, because we no longer have the nous to do it for ourselves.

It could of course be brinkmanship, the French might just be trying to get our own government and its brilliant strategists, to hand over our nuclear power industry for an even cheaper give-away price than we have already offered them. But it may not be that simple.

Some rather silly BBC reporter advised that this was serious for the government because "it would be embarrassing if the lights go out". How trivial can one make a subject of this importance? It's not the embarrassment, it's the destruction of the economy that matters.

A string of British governments, not just this latest lousy one, have managed to box us into a real corner. First they decided there were no votes in nuclear power so they have allowed the industry to atrophy to the point where we no longer have the engineers (or indeed the money ourselves) to rejuvenate it. It's because they know we can't afford it that they hoped the French might come and build them for us, so that we could pay for our electricity from current incomes in the future. It's basically a decision to opt for

a pre-payment meter for Britain instead of investing in the infrastructure.

Next, they decided there might be votes, and certainly lots of money for their big industry friends, in not fighting Europe over, and voting for, the man-made global warming thesis. This led to decisions about "leading the world" (God, are we sick of hearing this!) in the Kyoto process. It isn't true anyway because as it has been pointed out today in the news, exporting our CO2 emissions to the far east does not make us less of a CO2 emitter.

In consequence, they have ditched coal, which we have a lot of; they are putting huge amounts of our money into wind power, which exacerbates the problem rather then solving it; they have "invested" vast amounts of money in a gas infrastructure which is clearly now looking more and more like one of tomorrow's white-elephants; and they have procrastinated over nuclear for so long that they are now hoping the French will come and dig us out of the hole.

For a number of reasons this does not look like an optimal strategy. "Strategy" I would remind you is different from "tactics" in that it is concerned with the long-term overall picture. Firstly, they have ditched the most available solution, for a thesis which is NOT supported by the majority of scientists. Global warming may or may not be occurring; it may or may not be merely a cyclical fluctation; it is considered by the majority of scientists, though not politicians, to be highly unlikely to be man made.

What do politicians know about science? For this reason they have abandoned coal power.Secondly they have reached out for the nearest available straw, wind power, the use of which demands that we INCREASE the amount of electricity base-load, not decrease it. This is why they have suddenly and belatedly had to acknowledge that more nuclear power is desperately needed, not less. The more wind power they force on us, the worse does this situation become.

Thirdly, they have spent your money on a gas distribution network because at the time was was cheap. Apparently it has come as an enormous surprise to them to discover that gas production rates have been falling for some considerable time, and gas prices are rocketing. "Peak gas" is no more of a surprise than is "peak oil". Many people in the industry have been writing about it, and advising politicians about it for decades. Our own group of half-baked non-descripts ignored what they didn't want to see and we are

now increasingly dependent on falling supplies of increasingly expensive gas from countries which have no reason whatever to be kindly disposed to us. If you doubt this, try reading this article http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JG30Ag01.html

So where are we with nuclear? It may well be that the French, about 80% of whose power grid is supplied from nuclear, not only want to get something for nothing, but may indeed be faced with a plethora of choice. Even they have a limit to how many engineers and nuclear technicians they have available, and they are being asked by the gulf states, to whom a huge amount of our diminishing wealth is currently being transferred, to build nuclear power plants for them. Why bother with us?

Meanwhile, Malcolm Wicks, our energy supremo is described, because he is tall, as

"intelligence on stilts".

Bob Valentine Trueman

George Monbiot, Jonathon Porritt (now the government's "leading advisor" on green issues for heaven' sake!) and other greens are leading us to an earlier disaster than need be the case. In a recent Guardian article Monbiot again promotes the "anthropogenic global warming" thesis, and bemoans the fact that a growing percentage of us are developing grave doubts about it.

I concur with one reader/commentator in his/her apocalyptic vision of humankind's likely future. The continual growth of economies, as perennially advocated by politicians has, as could easily have been predicted, led us to the brink of disaster.

That humankind will shrink in numbers and average living standards is inevitable; only the rate is still questionable. This, after growing to about 9 Billion. I say average living standard, but the ones who will suffer most in the end are those of us in the developed nations, which seems pretty fair to me; we have had it rather too good for rather too long, even though that period has been less than 100 years. If you have developed the mental set, and the techniques to subsist in a small hut and on a quarter acre of arid land, you will probably not notice the difference.

The inevitability of contraction is a function of the energy density of oil, a physical property as uniquely remarkable in the universe as is water. A gallon of petrol does the equivalent of about three man-weeks of work. The relationship between the growth of economies and their consumption of energy has been fully established; those which have used (and wasted on fripperies) the most, have grown the most. The converse will be true, as we are forced to consume less energy, through its growing scarcity and burgeoning cost.

All of this is going to be painful enough, but the situation is being made far worse, and far more imminent, not only by our political systems, but by well-meaning folk like Monbiot.(I am less sure of the well meaningness of Mr Porritt). What would make "The Descent From Hubbert's Peak" perhaps a trifle less traumatic would be if we could find a gentler slope down it. What the "greens", and regrettably in my view those governments being persuaded by them are finding for us is a cliff, not a descent path.

Our governments are letting us down by persisting in their anachronistic belief in "growth"; our well-meaning 'greens' are leading us to earlier disaster than needs be the case by insisting that there is  scientific agreement that a) a generalised global warming exists; b) that it is caused by man made CO2; c) that it is in some way unique, as though it were not much more likely to be a manifestation of regular swings in the earth's overall climate; and d) that since they believe man has caused it (if it exists) then man is powerful enough to stop it. This is unlikely, and in any case closes off so many options as to be dangerous.

I find myself in great doubt about all of these. Monbiot says "Almost everyone seems to agree: . . . ". Do they? Probably almost everyone with whom he associates, but then "birds of a feather" etc. By proposing that there is no longer any debate about anthropogenic global warming, and that it is universally bad, that side of the argument is helping to create an insoluble situation, if only because by trying to do everything at once, there will be insufficient time to establish an orderly retreat.

I keep asking organisations like the IPCC, the NOAA, the Met Office, what a climate is and how long a climate is. I get no answers to these questions, but they are surely of significance? Is our climate, say 12,000 years long? What then of the previous "climate" of 12,000 years? It was an ice age. Or is our 'climate' 24,000 years long? That leads to yet another set of conclusions.

We should forget about CO2, it is not the most influential greenhouse gas anyway, not by a long chalk. We should certainly learn how to exist with lower energy levels, and the sooner the better, but we could use coal to help us find that gentler path down. It won't kill us. But present policies will, if only because the inculcated panic will lead us to more wars, sooner.

A small group of folk, of which I find myself an unwitting member, have for some years now been strongly arguing that the key issue facing the world is that of the PEAK OIL phenomenon. This now appears to be entering the main stream and happily to be doing so apparenlty pretty rapidly. The more the merrier; well, not actually merrier but it's still a Good Thing.

Where I  differ from most of my "Peak Oil" fellows, is that I have the gravest of doubts that the issue of "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" is soundly based on good science. Frankly, I don't believe it. There are those who accuse me of being in cahoots with the Devil because of this: soon they will be baying for my blood, or at least my excommunication; it has after all become a religion substitute.

This is an issue of the very greatest importance. I concurr fully with the suggestion that we need to use less energy, not just less oil though that is of equal significance. We will anyway, we do not have a choice. I wholly agree that unless we find ways of living with less consumption of it, our western civilisation is doomed. Actually I think it probably is anyway. So why, if I think this, does any of it matter?

Well, here's why, because in order to descend from the Oil Peak in as orderly a fashion as may be possible, losing fewer of our population and causing less rather than more suffering and misery; rather than with a catastrophic collapse, we simply MUST make good decisions right now.

Our leaders are making decisions right now, but are they good? The decisions involve all sorts of radical changes based on the thesis that Global Warming is both real and upon us, and that it is catastrophically bad. We are all doomed. Sure the earth has cooled over the last seven years, but that apparently is because of Global Warming. Come on!

The kinds of decisions therefore being made - at least by some, if not the oil states and the Far East - are based on the now ubiquitous "Reducing CO2" thesis in order to "Tackle Global Warming". A marvellous phrase that, totally meaningless and therefore of the greatest utility to our political leaders, who can make it seem to mean anything they like.

So we must close our nuclear power stations. We must close our coal fired power stations. We must plan to erect enough wind turbines to blight no less than 600 square miles of the best of Britain, we must under no circumstances re-open any coal mines even if that were possible etc. et flippin' cetera.

All the while of course, ensuring that more roads are built in line with government forecasts that car ownership (and driving miles) will continue to burgeon for years to come; and investing our reducing financial resources in new airport terminals, and additional runways upon which a likely shrinking number of aeroplanes will land.

Here's a brief extract from and ODAC release -

"..constraints around oil and gas are likely to worsen environmental damage rather than assist in reducing it. In the UK this week John Hutton put his cards on the table saying that he will support the building of new coal plants without waiting for development of carbon capture technology.(Oh I do hope this is true) In the US a poll showed increased public support for off-shore and Arctic drilling and weakening support for conservation."

On top of that there is the likelihood that even more wars both local and perhaps in larger theatres, are increasingly probable as our dependence on oil remains high, and the global competition for it heats up.

Very large amounts of money are being spent by governments around the world on scientific projects whose underlying raison d'etre is to prove anthropogenic global warming. They are going out in droves LOOKING for it. You find what you look for, especially if you are a scientist and your next project also depends on government money, while  being aware that the government WANTS you to find it.

But just look at the decisions that are being based on all of this. Just look at the huge number of other scientists (very highly qualified, and no less "moral" than the rest) who are repeatedly saying that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is nonsense. You will note that they get less publicity. Why is this?

What we should be doing is supporting projects which DENY anthropogenic global warming. If those projects come up short, if they fail in their attempts, then we will know that we have a ROBUST warming hypothesis upon which we can rely. That is proper science. After developing his major theories, and nearing the end of his life, xxxxxx left suggestions as to how his theory might be destroyed; so that if it wasn't, then we know its truth. Now that is honesty!

At the present time we DO NOT have such a balanced, scientifically robust, peer-reviewed theory about the hypothesised global warming. (I asked the NOAA and the British Met Office how long a climate lasted. I said "How long is a climate"? They have not replied to that question. It's fairly cogent though; 12,000 years ago there was an ice age, and for 12,000 years there has not been. Which of those is the climate?)

Despite the utterances of the IPCC (a political organisation remember) we can not have sufficient confidence in the "pro-warming" lobby's statements, and the argument is far from over. Until it is, our leaders are being nothing less than stupidly short sighted in their decision making. What else can we expect after all?

If you need any proof of this, just look at the "bio-diesel" craziness; look at the bio-ethanol stupidity; look at the way Britain for example is making itself dependent on energy supplying states that we KNOW have decided to use their energy resources for real-politik. Look at the largest effective subsidy the country has ever known supporting wind farms (or should I say Aeolean Parks!!) which even they know will never be any good.

What can you do about it? Well, don't just sit there, tell your MP what you think of it all. And keep telling them; it's the only thing they listen to in the end.

Bob Valentine Trueman
www.bobski.com