Note: This is not an official EU banner, but displayed in the Comission.

As military war is possibly the worst threat to humanity and the environment, alongside with famine caused by socialised economies, the Nobel Peace Price, is indeed one of of top events of the year. And constantly debated. This year, as well as previous.

The usual questions are: Should it really go to an organisation, and not to an heroic individual? Answer is that it’s OK according to Nobel’s will, though most of us probably find heroes more exciting.

Was it the right choice, and, the recurring question, is it really an honor, given the rather questionable choices previous years. Sure, there are some real heroes on the list, but to give it to Obama, not because he stopped any wars and atrocities, but because he had said he hoped to, made even the recipient himself embarrassed. And Gore and IPCC? It’s not customary to take back the prize, but Climategate ought to have been embarrassing for the committee.

The most heard comment about this year’s pick of the EU is that the project it really not that succcesful for the moment. On the other hand, you can hardly deny that it was, and is, a peace project. There are still unsolved conflictcs among members and neighbours, Cyprus, Sudetenland, Northern Balkan, but we will never know how the 20th century would have developed if not for the EEC/EU.

My annual reflection, given that there’s still some value in the prize, is that – especially in the light of this year’s choice – is that it should be awarded to Walburga Gräfin Habsburg Douglas, who,  literally, opened the iron curtain in August 1989, and her late father Otto von Habsburg, who would have turned 100 on November 20 this year. As International President and Secretary General of the Paneuropean Union, an organisation advocating European unity and peace, long before the EU, they, if any, should be regarded as icons of European peace. You might want to include the PEU itself too, if you want an organisation, the only Paneuropean movement that never accepted the division of Europe in West and East, a point the EU tended to be more ambivalent on.

A tempting alternative is of course to give it to CFACT in a few years, if our efforts to end the costly Climate War are succesful enough.

Next year, my friends!

Reluctant to write anything nice about Greenpeace, I still feel obliged to extend some compliments for their recent action at two nuclear plants in Sweden.

In order to, apart from being against nuclear, and energy in General, draw attention to the importance of safety, a group, all non Swedes, broke in to the safety area, one of them also managing to overnight before being caught.

They were all arrested, but only the overnighter was fined.

It should be added that they did only go as far as the first security area, not the top security. Good so.

Safety remains an issue, when it comes to nuclear. Not because the power plants in Northern Europe are especially vulnerable (with the exception of Ignalina) – no risk for earth quakes, reasonable precaution measures – but because they are too old. And big.

The reason for this is that politics has made it impossible to replace reactors, in the above cases built during the 70′s and 80′s, and – more disturbingly - prohibiting scientific research for decades.

Germany’s strange decision to just close down, will probably prove disastrous. Ignalina, definitely ought to be closed. The Swedish power plants amount to about 50 % of the national electricity supply, most of the rest is water. A true blessing in a region with harsh winters and sometimes hot summers.

Simply put: Tear them down. Build new, preferably small scale, keep it private to avoid governmental corruption, and pay that hefty insurance.

And hopefully, neither Greenpreace or I will beet a path to your door.

My esteemed colleague Teresa Küchler at SvD in Brussels, draw my attention to the rather awkward debate in the budget negotiations in the European Parliament, concerning the, apparently, no less awkward Copenhagen based, EU financed, European Environment Agency.

 The EEA, in their own words, have a noble cause: “Our task is to provide sound, independent information on the environment. We are a major information source for those involved in developing, adopting, implementing and evaluating environmental policy, and also the general public.”

What was up for questioning however, from the committee reviewing the budget, was somewhat different.

Anyone on a visit to Copenhagen, might wish to visit the offices, and admire the flower arrangements on the facade. Then again, maybe not. As this rather extravagant arrangement, costing about 300 000 Euro, naturally perished in the Danish climate.

But at least, they took study trips to the Caribbean. Still unclear why. But it sounds nice. And expensive.

And accommodated the environmental group EarthWatch, in the offices, also handing out grants to this – regardless of ideology - biased group, incidentally (until it was discovered) harboring the EEA Executive Director Jacquline McGlade as advisor. 

 There are many things in the EU budget to be critical of. A simple solution for this particular institute however would be: Just Close It Down.

About 50 years ago, the book Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson was published, and triggered an environmental debate that has been going on since then. Lot’s of articles are written about this these days, and, Cato Institute, among others, has published an essay collection.

Carson passed away in 1964, and I do not for a moment doubt her good intentions, but the sad fact is that few books probably have caused as much damage.

On the positive side, we can notice that basically all of her alarms turned out to be false. The world in general, has just gotten better, cleaner and more developed.

At the same time, the impact the book had triggered – together with other doomsayers of the time – a green movement that has consistently fought all of the above.

And most importantly, and sad, is that it triggered the debate on DDT, eventually leading to a ban. This is probably the most disastrous mistake by the greens and politicians globally, not counting the Soviet experiment, have commited. We will never know for certain, but it’s most likely that, without the ban, Malaria would long ago have been exterminated, instead of taking millions and millions of lives.

But the birds still sing in the not so silent spring.

Not yet a Tornado

Some years ago, my esteemed colleague and friend Edgar Gärtner coined the concept Eco Nihilism, describing it as the worst threat to common sense in the environmental debate, and consequently to the environment.

I somehow love innovative, conclusive expressions. 

This is a new one Noble Cause Corruption, coined by Anthony Watts. (To noble to take credit however)

Read the article to get the whole picture, but let me give you some highlights:

 ANTHONY WATTS: There’s a term that was used to describe this. It’s called noble cause corruption. And actually I was a victim of that at one time, where you’re so fervent you’re in your belief that you have to do something. You’re saving the planet, you’re making a difference, you’re making things better that you’re so focused on this goal of fixing it or changing it that you kind of forget to look along the path to make sure that you haven’t missed some things.

 and, in this interview, made by Spencer Michels, he goes on with some important observations:

I started looking into the idea that weather stations have been slowly encroached upon by urbanization and sighting issues over the last century. Meaning that our urbanization affected the temperature. And this was something that was very clear if you looked at the temperature records. But what wasn’t clear is how it affected the trend of temperatures. And so that’s been something that I’ve been investigating. Anyone who’s ever stood next to a building in the summertime at night, a brick building that’s been out in the summer sun, you stand next to it at nigh,t you can feel the heat radiating off of it. That’s a heat sync effect. And over the last 100 years our country, in fact the world, has changed. We’ve gone from having mostly a rural agrarian society to one that is more urban and city based and as a result the infrastructure has increased. We’ve got more freeways, you know more airports, we’ve got more buildings. Got more streets, all these things. Those are all heat syncs. During the day, solar insulation hits these objects and these surfaces and it stores heat in these objects. At night it releases that heat. Now if you are measuring temperature in a city that went from having uh maybe 10% of um, non-permeable surface to you know maybe 90% over 100 years, that’s a heat sync effect and that should show up in the record. The problem is, is that it’s been such a slow subtle change over the last 100 years. It’s not easy to detect and that’s been the challenge and that’s what I’ve been working on.

You get Tosca instead. It’s a pity I could not use the brilliant headline from this article: Apocalypse Not, by Matt Ridley, in Wired Science. It sums up a lot.

“Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening redictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us arnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killerbees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.

So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize.”

Couldn’t have summarized it better (and please read the full article). But if you are really interested, try my instant polling. Might not be too scientific,  but it helps you understand what is important.

Check Em out. When doing a poll some years ago with informed environmental debaters, Asteroids came out first, as the worst – currently hard, if not impossible, to battle – political schemes, such as CAP came in second.

Doing a similar poll with non scientists, all fears were around faimily life, illnesses and everything connected to that.

What might be threatening, if I may poll myself, is politicians messing with energy. Or pesticides for that matter. Both save lives.

And most importantly, if you absolutely need to scare your kids, scare them with politicians. Not with science. Possibly Scarpia.  

Oil prices might go up and down, and as for the price of petrol, in most of Europe it’s a matter of taxes. When I was a kid, in the 70′s, I was told there was some sort of Oil Cricis, and then with everything happening in the Middle East and today it’s Syria – and still Iran – and the Arctic…Well, those are all problems, but check out this article on the real situation concerning oil.

“As the energy expert Leonardo Maugeri contends in a recent report published by the Belfer Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, ‘contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption.’

Mr. Maugeri, a research fellow at the Belfer Center and a former oil industry executive, bases that assertion on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world. He concludes that ‘by 2020, the world’s oil production capacity could be more than 110 million barrels per day, an increase of almost 20 percent.’”

As a colleague likes to point out; Resources Don’t Exist. They are created by humans. Some hundred years ago, petrol was unheard of. Some thousand years ago [fill in what you like] was unheard of. In a hundred years from now, or maybe even ten years, brilliant humans might have found even more ways to turn strange materia into energy. Looking forward to that, but until then, keep that oil flowing, you courageous engineers.

Where Would You Like To Go

Unlike other summers, this year is rightfully filled with daily news. The EU, Syria, just to mention a few and disregarding the Olympics. No tabloids with reported aliens or slight nudity in the city.

For fans of science, and science fiction, however, we get our fair share.

According to a most ambitious take on Time Travel, this prospect also reveals sociological, and in a way political, patterns.

No, stop it right right there. Regardless of that particle under the Swiss/French alps, No, it’s not possible. The interesting thing is that conservatives/classical liberals tend to be more inclined to travel to the future, than to the past. The same group of people who normally question Malthus (refuted long ago by reality), and Rachel Carson (same thing).

Consequently, the same people who would consider going back in time, are those who by draconian environmental regulations, strive to recreate ancient living conditions.

It might be called rational optimism. The world is not going blast within a foreseeable future, and the politicians should stop infringing liberty and spending our money on futile projects to battle another SF-idea; Man Made Global Warming. Not that I’m all unhappy here, but, hey, with the right company, a trip into a future where the UNFCCC has not destroyed it all could be fun.

I can be the tour leader. And then we are, apparently, off to Mars. That’s just a robot running around, but people are going crazy over it. I admit to some enthusiasm myself, though I presume that the only chance for human colonisation lies way beyond this solar system. And its costly, I know, but it’s fun. A reason as god as any to let private companies take care of future explorations.

You might remember the Back-to-Nature movement of the 70′s. That was a rather harmless way for people, longing for the genuine way of living, to move into the countryside to enjoy the splendor of bad, or no, plumbing.
Fine with me. A general observation is that most of these people eventually moved back to the cities, naturally with the exception of those who really knew the fine art of running a farm, instead of just manhandling animals. A slight, but just slight, generalisation, is also that they started to apply both standards and politics in their new back yards. Most Green parties in Northern Europe have their majority of supporters in fancy city center neighbourhoods.

The thing this year is bee keeping. In the city.

It’s a nice idea for the Hilton to be able to serve fresh honey. Nice idea for anyone, really. Bees, if handled the right way, tend to stay at home. When they wander, no such luck.

For quite a few people, a sting can be lethal. And though city dwellers are closer to emergency, the time line is tight.

You might want to compare this to the ever increasing frenzy, using the same generalisation again, about smoking. Staged by the same people.

If you choose to live in a rural area, you accept the rules of nature. I have considered moving, but – yes – my allergy – and my love of infrastructure has prohibited it.

If you choose to live in the city, you accept motor vehicles, dogs, bikers (those two should learn some traffic manners however), smokers, neighbours. And the proximity to challenging discussions with other city-dwellers. Preferably in the evening on your own balcony, where you soon can’t smoke, or at the bar next door, where you can’t smoke.

The mix up of environmental standards here is, though naturally we tolerant people tend to be, well, tolerant, not so tolerant. Bee swarms in the city can be lethal. Serving roasted peanuts in a closed environment can be lethal. Smoking too, but for bystanders it’s at worst a nuisance. We smoking city-dwellers tend to accept a certain amount of hassle. It’s a choice. We just want the greeners to show the same courtesy. As my late friend Karl Hess wrote in his memoirs Mostly on the Edge: [All I ever wanted was to be] “A Good Anarchist, A Good Lover and A Good Neighbour.”

It was on the evening news. And then in the morning papers. The arctic ices were melting with unprecedented speed.

Turns out it was Greenland and not very unprecedented.

“’Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,’says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.” As quoted here.

Could be added that Greenland is, albeit a large part, not the entire arctic region.

Climate indeed changes, and typically in a cyclical manor. Greenland apparently is hit on a 150 years basis, more global changes tend to have a 500 year span, at least in modern times. Greenland is Danish territory, so I guess the Danes now remember their loss five hundred years ago, when enemy troops could walk across the ice and change the map of Europe.

Today, Greenland is great for research and all forms of arctic exploration, and also a crucial landing point for refueling of smaller aircraft. I would not recommend trying to cross the ice to go there, but the good news is the melting apparently stopped and the ice started growing, only days after the alarm.