BBC correspondent Dan Collyns has got form. As I reported back in February, he was caught red-handed making nonsense predictions that the seas round the Galapagos Islands were heating up so fast that they were heading for boiling point. This eco-propagandist, who belongs to greenie alarmist group GRNlive, is at it again, this time reporting that a group of Peruvians have become so brainwashed and deluded as a result of propaganda pushed by lunatics like Mr Collins that they are actually painting bits of the Andes white in the hope that it will help reflect heat and stop glaciers melting. No matter that it’s nonsense to suggest that Andean galciers are melting because of ‘climate change’ (many scientists believe that melting is cyclical and exaggerated by other factors); lay aside, too, that it’s the most stupid idea since Cnut tried to stop the tide coming in (although, actually that story is a myth; the Andes one isn’t). To the the BBC and Mr Collins, it’s all good scare-mongering stuff, so it must be news.
WHITEWASH!
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I love this little bit of the report.
The World Bank clearly believes the idea – the brainchild of 55-year-old Peruvian inventor, Eduardo Gold – has merit as it was one of the 26 winners from around 1,700 submissions in the “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” competition at the end of 2009.
Mr Gold, who has no scientific qualifications but has studiously read up on glaciology, is enthused that the time has come to put his theory into practice.
That probably gives him credit at the BBC, just like every other beeboid that reports on the nonsense that is man made climate change there isn’t an O’level in Physics between the lot of these halfwit mongs.
“it was one of the 26 winners from around 1,700 submissions”
Makes me wonder about the other 1674 submissions if they thought this has merit.
Submission 1674: “Kill a few billion people”
Submission 1673: “Sterilise the population for at least 25 years”
Submission 1672: “Everyone should be made to fly a reflective kite at the weekend”
Submission 1671: “We should go back to living in caves”
Submission 1670:”All power stations should be destroyed”
Submission 1669:”A massive, thin hemp cloth could woven and sent up into space to blanket the warmest areas”
ete, etc
This isn’t bias, it is just barking mad.
Er, hang on. I assume this 3rd world idiocy…
(okay, name one thing the 3rd world and its “inventors” have done for us)
….is based on the principle that white surfaces reflect “heat”… but were will that “heat” be reflected back into…
Er, the atmosphere? Which will presumably cause the air temperature then to… RISE? Thus melting the glacier faster?
Sounds just as plausible as Gold’s moronic idea, which reminds me so much of BLACKADDER or Peter Cook & Dudley Moore sketch.
“Well chaps, we’re going over the top to certain death in a totally futile gesture!”
This just goes to show you shouldn’t buy your news from a corporation which has the mass manufacture of junk TV like Eastenders and Casualty as its main business.
Maybe there was a bunch of whitewash left over from the various review committees around the globe that have unanimously agreed that a bunch of folk taking a ton of money and skimming off most of it in the name of a vague climate ‘it’ is just tickedy-boo.
Zero chance of a proper interview by the BBC of any politician spouting Warmist paniky nonsense. It would be lovely to see any UK politician slewered like this :
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/06/20/how_to_expose_a_warmist_andrew_bolt_interviews_australias_al_gore_106015.html
That is one of the best skewerings of an alarmist I’ve seen. And guess what, that Flannery wallah is a major investor in one of those cranky ‘alternative’ energy plants. Beware the world ‘alternative’, especially when applied to energy sources and comedians, it’s just a weasel word for impractical and useless.
andy — great stuff.
Bolt was cool, calm and collected. As opposed to the Flim Flannery man who is a fool, alarmist, and disconnected from reality
He also got the guy on the massive amounts of OUR money the Global Warm Mongers are getting for their uneconomic craziness…
We are going to see a whole lot of other technologies and innovations which are now well under way which we could use instead of nuclear power.
Bolt: Such as?
Flannery: Such as concentrated PV technology, geothermal technology, wave power, wind power…
Bolt: You’re an investor in geothermal technology , aren’t you? [Flannery’s investment in geo-thermal technology received a $90 million grant from the Australian government last year.]
Flannery: Yeah, I am. Indeed.
Bolt: How come you don’t declare that.
Flannery: Well, I’ve just done it.
John,
Great link. You are right , we will never see that on the BBC.
I think “Flannery” is a misprint of “flummery”.
i think these South Americans, in evolution terms, are about 50 year behind us because in 1956, the Defence Minister Duncan Sandys banned National Servicemen from painting coal white
god help these people, they’ve got over 5 decades of cliff richards music to listen to
You’re right when I was in the forces they made us paint black lines between the tiles on the shower floors to ‘pass a weekend’ I kid you not!!!
Reflecting heat back into an atmosphere that is supposedly a greenhouse helps keep things cooler how, exactly?
Maybe phase one is to paint shit white. And phase two is to open the windows of the greenhouse.
Actually light-coloured surfaces do have a cooling effect and dark ones a heating effect. This is a long-established phenomenon, known as albedo. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
It occurs because light-coloured surfaces such as snow reflect most of the sun’s radiation, mostly shorter wavelengths, perceived as light, which the atmosphere is more transparent to. So they escape back into space. Dark surfaces absorb the light and re-emmit it as longer wavelengths (heat) which the atmosphere is less transparent to.
Compare, say a white sand beach and a black tarmac carpark on a sunny day and you should see the difference.
Now whether painting mountains white will have anything more than a very local effect is another matter and seems very dubious.
Ed,
That’s locally, on the surface. This would have no effect on the climate at large. If anything, it’s going to reflect heat which will then go somewhere else and make things worse elsewhere.
Hold the whitewash! There is actually a cooling trend in the Bolivian highlands.
Bolivia’s rapidly diminishing Chacaltaya glacier has been widely used as a symbol of Anthropogenic Global Warming (1). However, it is an unfortunate choice of symbol, because the retreat of this specific glacier is demonstrably not due to increasing temperatures caused by CO2 emissions.
[..}
If the rapid melting of Chacaltaya since the mid 1970s were caused by increasing temperatures due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere, we would have observed increased night time temperatures, increased average temperatures, and increases in cloud cover and precipitation (that is what CO2 driven climate models would suggest). But instead we have observed decreasing cloud cover, decreasing average temperatures (likely the result of night time temperatures falling more than day time temperatures increased), and decreasing precipitation, all of which conspired to melt the glacier.
The observed evidence from Chacaltaya is thus inconsistent with the Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming (AGW) theory, or, at least, if there is an AGW signal, it is completely drowned by other climatic changes unrelated to AGW.
It is ironic that the melting Chacaltaya glacier has become such an important symbol of the AGW theory, when in fact the evidence from Chacaltaya seems to refute this theory. (In contrast, the evidence from Chacaltaya is fully consistent with Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory (5), but that is another story).
Full article here
Hah, a few facts like that aren’t going to deflect the beeboids from their fixed position. Every week Farming Today opens a new and completely irrelevant front, in the beeboid war to prevent a cull of infected badgers in tb hotspot areas.
They are exactly like labour, in that they believe that if they continually re-state their position, even if it proves hopelessly wrong, they have won the argument.
Badgers are England’s Polar Bears.
So they will become naturally extinct without culling !