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Home  Latest News Latest California going wrong way with new pollution control measures
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California going wrong way with new pollution control measures |
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by Bobby Fontaine
June 26, 2008
California’s taken upon itself the responsibility to lead the way on the most important environmental issue of all time, global warming caused by excessive carbon dioxide emissions. But let’s look at ancient and recent historical landmarks in global warming science and politics. Global warming first surfaced in the 1980s as the theory Dr. James Hansen from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. 
California dreamin'..
He claimed carbon dioxide emissions were building up in the atmosphere to such high levels that the earth would warm to extreme temperatures where the future of life here could be threatened. He was Al Gore’s top advisor on global warming science in the publishing of his book and movie “An Inconvenient Truth” |
I followed the global warming and cooling debates closely throughout the 80’s. There were many theories being proposed about what might happen as our industrious efforts as intelligent animals lead to huge amounts of pollutants entering the natural atmosphere changing its composition and possibly effecting temperatures. Most of the discussions were about chemical pollutants and their effect on mixing with water vapor either enhancing the suns reaction to the atmosphere warming it or reflecting its rays back out into space making it cooler. The irony of the debate was that scientists came to Washington to forecast what they thought was going to happen while politicians decided which one of them they thought was right.
At the time, none of them knew what was going happen so there really wasn’t any reason to support one direction or another. But in my understanding of the issue, in the scientific communities collective mind, CO2 was at the bottom of the list of what they thought would actually cause climate change. In fact my take on it was that in many of their minds, it wasn’t even irrelevant to the topic. But in the end, CO2 was chosen by politicians, not a consensus of scientists, as where we should focus our concerns on climate change issues. I remember being dumbfounded by the direction they were heading.
Today we’re still marching full steam ahead in the direction of mitigating emissions of carbon dioxide in order to save ourselves from what we’re witnessing daily with changes in earth’s climate while adopting complex and expensive programs to limit emissions of CO2 as the solution. We’re doing this while the more relevant science about what’s causing weather pattern changes, some of which is presented by James Hansen himself in what he calls his “alternative scenario” to his CO2 global warming theory, seems to be nonexistent in the public debate about what to do about it. In Hansen’s other more private theory he says “rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases,” which he says are chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide. He goes on to say “If sources of CH4 (methane) and O3 (ozone) precursors were reduced in the future, the change in climate forcing by non-CO2 (carbon dioxide) GHGs (GreenHouse Gases) in the next 50 years could be near zero.” The most common precursors for low level ozone are ethanol, gasoline, coal, and diesel emissions.
So what he’s saying in his alternative to his theory that CO2 is causing the problem of climate change is that CO2 has nothing to do with it while if we limit emissions of these other pollutants, there would be no climate change.
So to recap, Hansen has the world, especially the state of California and Al Gore, convinced that his unproven “theory” of CO2 causing global warming is where we need to focus our efforts to stop what we see as dramatic and dangerous changes in weather patterns while in the year 2000, he came up with this little heard of alternative theory to his carbon dioxide theory where he claims that what we’re seeing today has nothing to do with CO2. It’s convenient, I’ll give him that. He makes me wish I was a scientists where I could hedge my theories like I was a Wall Street speculator so I come out ahead no matter which way the weather turns.
But then there’s another scientist from the same office in NASA who says something totally different from what Hansen says. Professor Drew Shindell has been saying what Hansen says in his secret backup theory in case his CO2 theory fall’s through since the time climate change became a matter of public debate. But Shindell’s been exclusively saying weather pattern changes we believe are global warming are caused regionally on a global scale by pollutants other than CO2 rather than having a pile of theories he can chose from when politics demands a new direction to mislead the public. See Shindell doesn’t have a second theory. He’s stuck to what he believes and even gone so far as to prove it. But his public success has been largely overshadowed by politicians like Al Gore adopting Hansen’s “CO2 “theory” even though there’s no evidence to support it’s relevant in the discussion of climate change whatsoever.
OK, wait a minute. That’s not true. CO2 science is relevant at the same time that it isn’t. See it’s been proven that throughout time, the earth has gone through many warming and cooling phases. And it’s been proven that during extreme warming phases, CO2 levels have spiked to record high levels, some even below what they are now. So graphs have been drawn up and spread all over Washington DC and capitol cities throughout the world showing parallels between warming trends and CO2 levels. But what this view of the issue ignores is that these other pollutants of chlorofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, low level ozone, and ozone precursors of nitrogen oxides and non methane volatile organic compounds that Hansen says is his second theory is causing weather pattern changes and Shindell in his first is that they are naturally occurring pollutants as well as manmade while they all eventually turn into carbon dioxide as they break down in the atmosphere to become inert.
This means that once these chemical compounds have expressed the energy values interacting in the atmosphere with each other, sun rays, water vapor, and other atmospheric radicals, it becomes CO2. Let me try to clarify what I mean. Burned or exploded gunpowder leaves residues of gunpowder and lead. It’s evidence that gunpowder has been ignited, not the gunpowder that was originally ignited, that’s gone, poof, burned up. It’s simple but still hard to understand. What California is trying to do is regulate the residue of what’s causing climate change while allowing emissions that cause weather pattern changes to be ignored because it hasn’t turned into the residue CO2 yet. They’re ignoring the cause of so called global warming being these pollutants before they become inert CO2 where they’re looking at the large amounts of CO2 as evidence of climate change, which it is, after the fact, not what’s causing it.
Basically what they’re doing is akin to a detectives showing up at a crime scene claiming they saved the day by getting there before the murder happened because they found gunpowder residue on the corpse signifying that the gun had not been fired yet. I know, that’s ludicrous, just like California’s new global warming policy.
So what should California be doing instead?
First of all, the world would do well by listening to a scientist who has one theory he sticks to instead of one who has a public political one and a private scientific one. I mean if the world trusts Dr. Hansen’s judgement enough to put all our efforts in one direction based on his unproven theory on CO2, why not trust his judgment in his second theory that he has evidence to support as fact. And if you’re willing to accept his more plausible second theory over his original unbelievable one that Al Gore finds so fascinating, then why not listen to who he plagiarized it from.
Let’s find out who received the first recognition in NASA history by Scientific American as being among the top fifty scientists in the country in 2004 and make them our leader on climate change, how’s that sound? Was it the guy who waivers and waffles all over the scientific spectrum grabbing whatever sounds good to politicians at the time or the one who silently works proving what he originally claimed when this debate began in the 1980’s? Do I even need to answer? Well yeah, I guess I really with do. The way things are done these day’s, it actually could have been Hansen.
But of course the answer is Professor Drew Shindell. He was chosen as one of the top scientists in the world, which means that in the year 2004, Scientific American was trying to tell us that when it comes to climate change issues, we need to be listening to Professor Shindell, not James Hansen, or they would have chose Hansen instead. Maybe we can credit Hansen with his ability to sell his product in Washington and fault Shindell for seeming inability to get his message out, although Shindell has testified on Capitol Hill that Bush has been allowing lobbyists from the oil industry to censor his work before it‘s published to such an extent that it no longer represents the science he’s trying to explain.
So is this how everything in this country works now - whatever is the most popular notion of an issue is what politicians can chose to represent as fact without searching further for what’s really going on. I mean I know most of what I know about this issue from reading the newspaper, although digging deeper into it than what’s on the front page. I’ve been to Capitol Hill many times. The halls of congressional office buildings are always littered with piles of current newspapers from all over the country. I even pick them up and read them front to back because it never looks like anyone else is. Has it gotten to the point where our leaders only read the front page of the most popular news source while passing it sitting on the hall floors of their office buildings. The majority of citizens in this country are not going to be familiar with all the facts on any particular issue, and shouldn’t have to, that’s why we hire them, to know what’s really going, to read the whole newspaper.
Look at ethanol being mixed with gasoline. I can’t begin to tell you how all the reasons we’re doing it are so terribly wrong. If you want to read more on what I have to say about ethanol, go to http://clandestinecandidate.com/cannazine.htm and check out my archive of news article. But the one aspect of ethanol I want to focus on here that’s relevant to this topic is how it causes huge emissions of the kinds of ozone precursors Shindell says react violently in the suns rays when mixing with water vapor in the atmosphere causing climate change, which is acetaldehyde. The kind of ethanol being mixed with gasoline now is anhydrous ethanol, which is like very strong moonshine. Acetaldehyde is what gives us hangovers when we drink too much. It combines with nitrogen oxide from the gasoline it’s mixed with and other sources like diesel engines and coal burning, in ultraviolet C rays from the sun to form low level ozone smog, which all of these pollutants and the resulting pollutants caused by mixing in the sun are very dangerous to breath.
Ethanol also causes gasoline to have much higher octane ratings than the engines it’s put in are designed to use which makes engines run much hotter causing excessive emissions of nitrous oxide (NOx). Nitrous oxide is the worst by far of all greenhouse gases. Its rated as three hundred times worse than CO2. But still California is heading in the direction of reigning in its business community regulating carbon dioxide footprints rather than putting a halt to ethanol use.
But lets go back in time to 1993 and 94 when California last had a droughts like it’s having now with the whole state continuously on fire while at the same time, the Midwest was suffering from chronic flooding, like it is now. That was when MTBE first began to be added to gasoline in high amounts. MTBE is an oxygenate like ethanol is. Oxygenate additives to gasoline began as a way to get rid of gray brown hazes that used to hang over most metropolitan cities in the US. That old fashion smog was mostly made up of nitrogen oxide emissions from coal and diesel use. Then through the use of oxygenates, low level ozone forming pollutants from MTBE mixed with the smog making it turn more orange or even appearing to go away while making air quality far more dangerous to breath. But since we couldn’t see it anymore, we stopped bugging the EPA about it. Since they don’t like being bothered about the quality of the air we breath, they told us it was cleaner and everyone was happy.
Now we’ve switched to ethanol because MTBE polluted groundwater all over the country. So now California is on fire again suffering from drought and daily heat-waves while the Midwest is flooding like it did in the early 90’s as water vapor from California is evaporating at larger than natural rates rising higher into the atmosphere than it should so it doesn’t come back down in the region it used to be groundwater in. Instead, it hits the jet stream and comes down as the pollutants it’s attached to breaks down in the sun releasing it from its toxic grip becoming rain over the Midwest. But still California thinks it’s going to solve its global warming problems by reigning in carbon dioxide emissions claiming ethanol has a lesser carbon footprint than gasoline, which even if that were true, once its acetaldehyde emissions break down into CO2,,,well there isn’t much point in discussing it. At this point it’s irrelevant. I mean if ethanol’s emissions were more CO2 instead of acetaldehyde, then it wouldn’t be a problem, except for all the other problems ethanol production and use causes, which still is only a problem if it’s used as on oxygenate, or anhydrous ethanol. I know, its confusing.
Look at part of new legislation the governor of Louisiana signed a couple days ago. It simplifies what I can’t to seem to say in a few short sentences –
(2) Hydrous Ethanol - The use of hydrous ethanol blends of E10, E20, E30 and E85 in motor vehicles specifically selected for test purposes will be permitted on a trial basis until January 1, 2012. During this period the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry Division of Weights & Measures will monitor the performance of the motor vehicles. The hydrous blends will be tested for blend optimization with respect to fuel consumption and engine emissions. Preliminary tests conducted in Europe have proven that the use of hydrous ethanol, which eliminates the need for the hydrous-to-anhydrous dehydration processing step, results in an energy savings of between ten percent and forty-five percent during processing, a four percent product volume increase, higher mileage per gallon, a cleaner engine interior, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions:
That’s how ethanol is supposed to used, just like how we should be listening to Drew Shindell instead of Al Gore and James Hansen. And there’s one more bit of science that we aren’t getting the whole story on, what causes earthquakes. Why is it relevant to this discussion? That’s simple but you may not believe it until I prove it by making a prediction for when California has its next big one and am correct about it. Yeah, I can do that. Scientists can’t but I can, and it’s so simple you can do it too.
I’ve been following earthquakes being caused by drought ending rains for over ten years and have never been wrong in my predictions. l even carefully plotted last years drought in Georgia and the surrounding states that ended briefly on the day the recent earthquake in China happened. And I’ve done it many other times documenting my efforts using scientific methods that would be acceptable if I happen to have a degree in earthquake science and my researched was backed by millions of dollars in grant money. But what I do is too simple to have to go through all that trouble while the truth would send a lot of hard working scientists home with no paychecks, which is the reason why these issues and many others never seem to get solved until a guy like me comes along who doesn’t just figure out how the facts fit together correctly but also has the ability to get out here and fight to present you what I’ve discovered scratching and clawing my way past the people making money off the lie by badgering you with the truth until you understand it enough and make enough noise about it so change has to follow.
All I do is see a drought and then rain coming to that same the region. That’s how I know there will be a resulting earthquake. It happens when the weight from groundwater that left the soil slowly comes back quickly causing the earth’s plates to flinch. You can even check back in California’s recent history of when droughts ended and major earthquakes occurred to see there’s a correlation between when MTBE caused droughts and flooding in 1993 and 1994 leading up to earthquakes, which is identical to what’s taking place with ethanol now.
What’s my advice for California?
Stop adding anhydrous ethanol to gasoline taking it out a little at a time to allow normal weather patterns to slowly come back hopefully without causing major shifts in weight in the earth plates where a lot of small non threatening earthquakes may take the place of a major catastrophic one. And while doing this, make it a public and transparent process so people are aware of what might happen to they can know how to react to it while having input into the process so that whatever I and whoever leads this revolt misses, the people will likely figure out and make known.
And while doing this, pray I don’t know what I’m talking about. That is what I do every time I see this coming, hoping I prove myself wrong so I no longer have to feel like I’m responsible for what happens because I can’t find a way to get anyone to listen to what I’m saying. But it never happens. I make my prediction and hope to be wrong where there’s no major catastrophic earthquake at the time and place I say there will be. That would allow me to put to rest my theory and let the experts go back to teaching me how the world works. But I’m never wrong which means I don’t stray far from this keyboard until people start to listen because I can’t do what the rest of them do, turn my back on the truth and let the dice roll wherever chance dictates because I gotta live with myself between throws.
I don’t know how your leaders live with their lies. For me, it’s not matter of nerves or conscience but common sense. Perhaps that’s where all the problems of the world come from, a shortage of common sense, a lack of simple truth over too many complex lies. Whatever the case, if this article isn’t validated by the first half of its content, an earthquake will come along as the drought being caused by ethanol ends completing the purpose of why I published this. In fact now that the drought has already happened with millions of tons more weight being relieved from California’s surface by wildfires, it will happen anyway. But if Californians take what I wrote here seriously, then at least you will see it coming. Either way, this article will be here as a reminder of what happens when you mix politics with science allowing politicians to have the last word in deciding what reality is.
So no matter what happens, you win. Not really but it’s the best news I can tell you, that either way, you got me here telling you I told you so. So bookmark this page so you don’t forget where it is so you can come back when it is all over and be reminded I warned you but you didn’t listen.
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