BIODIESEL AND GOVERNMENT "HELP????"

In this time of gas supplies and prices going up, food shortages and their prices going up and a lot of the food prices being blamed on our mega farmers being subsidized by Government money (ie: YOUR MONEY) to plant, grow and produce ethanol crops and fuel; we have many Americans who still have the do it yourself attitude trying to help in small ways, THIS is a sad comment on how the government bureaucracy wants to "help" in any and every way they can. Follow the Money Trail!!  Read and weep.

 

 

ALTERNATIVE FUEL USERS IN HOT WATER

State tax board has processed fewer than 70 of the required "fuel supplier" licenses

By EVAN HALPER
Los Angeles Times

 

Dave Eck, a Half Moon Bay mechanic, attracted a media spotlight with his fleet of vehicles fueled by used fryer grease from a local chowder house. So when Sacramento called, he figured officials wanted advice on promoting alternative fuels.

Not at all. The government rang to notify Eck that he was a tax cheat.

He was scolded for failing to get a "diesel fuel supplier's license," reporting quarterly how many gallons of grease he burns, and paying a tax on each gallon.

"All of a sudden they nailed me for a road tax," said Eck, who drives a Hummer converted to run on vegetable oil. "I said, 'Not a problem. I'll do my part. But what do I get? At least let me into the carpool lane.'"

No such luck. The state offered Eck only a potentially large fine — and not just for failing to pay taxes. He can get in trouble for carting kitchen grease away from eateries without a license from the state Meat and Poultry Inspection Branch.

Or for not having at least $1 million in liability insurance, in case he spills some of the stuff. Or for not getting permission from the state Air Resources Board to burn fat in the first place.

The regulations are so burdensome that even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, trying to set an example for Californians by driving a Hummer that burns cooking oil, has not complied. Schwarzenegger, who has said that the exhaust from his Hummer smells so much like French fries that his passengers get hunger pangs, was unaware that he was required  to send Sacramento an 18-cent road tax for every gallon of kitchen oil he burned, said spokesman Aaron McLear. After the Los Angeles Times raised the issue, McLear said the governor would pay the taxes he owed.

The governor's staff says it is working on making it easier to drive using vegetable oil without being an outlaw.

"We are very interested in making sure people who have these kinds of vehicles are able to comply as easily as possible," McLear said.

But environmentalists are frustrated.

"It is ridiculous that we live in what is presumed to be one of the greenest states in the nation, yet we have the most antiquated laws to deal with green energy," said Josh Tickell, an alternative-fuels advocate and filmmaker whose documentary "Fields of Fuel" recently won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival.

"Everyone I know wants to do the right thing by the law," he said. "But the state is not set up to even clearly provide information to folks."

The veggie oil crowd is hardly on the radical fringe anymore. Garages report being overwhelmed with conversion business, and restaurants throughout Southern California are contending with raids on their used-grease tanks.

Advocates say more than 250,000 Americans are running their vehicles on cooking oil, with the biggest concentration in California.

Drivers do it for different reasons: to protect the environment, to reduce dependence on foreign oil or to save money. Those using vegetable oil say they do so for as little as $1 a gallon, even though grease yields better mileage than gasoline and about the same as diesel fuel.

Almost all of them are doing it underground. The state tax board has processed fewer than 70 of the required "fuel supplier" licenses, according to a spokeswoman. Most of those are for businesses selling commercial biodiesel, a more mainstream fuel that is typically mixed with as much as 80 percent petroleum.

State agencies say they have reasons for doing things the way they do.

Tax authorities say biofuel drivers need to pay for using California's roads, just like everyone else, and there is no simple way to collect from those who don't go to the gas pumps, where road taxes are normally levied.

The meat and poultry agency is worried about toxic spills. Officials with the air board are troubled by kitchen-grease emissions, especially when spewed by vintage diesel Mercedes-Benzes, the make of choice for many vegetable oil converts.

Matthew Tiffany, a 26-year-old student and environmentalist in Monrovia, Calif., tried to help some 20 veggie oil drivers go legal and found the task nearly impossible.

Tiffany, who fills his 1981 diesel Mercedes with fryer grease from a neighborhood Japanese restaurant, launched a cooperative called Good Earth Grease Haulers. His mission was to bring veggie oil drivers into the mainstream.

But Good Earth Grease Haulers quickly collapsed, after Tiffany got tangled in red tape trying to help members comply with license requirements.

"They want us to follow all these rules that were set up to regulate people who transport hundreds of gallons a day," Tiffany said.

He recently appeared before a legislative committee to urge lawmakers to exempt veggie oil users from having to pay for a license after the Meat and Poultry Inspection Branch raised the cost from $75 to $300.

State Assemblyman Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, a rice farmer who is handy with car engines, expressed bewilderment at the hoops Tiffany had to jump through to get permission to transport a few gallons of used fryer grease.

"Why do you even tell anyone you are taking it?" he asked.

Tiffany reminded the assemblyman that it was required by law.

Although most drivers burning kitchen oil have managed to evade enforcement -- government agencies say they have handed out few citations -- those who attract attention to themselves by promoting the alternative fuel tend to hear from regulators.

Craig Reece, owner of PlantDrive in Berkeley, which sells kits to convert diesel engines to run on vegetable oil, said he got a call from state officials about paying the road tax. He has since been sending the tax forms to all his customers, but he figures only a few are actually registering with the state and keeping logs of how much oil they burn.

"A lot of my customers think this fuel should be exempt from taxes," he said. "They feel they ought to get something for the climate-change-neutral aspect of it."

Illinois, North Carolina, Texas, Rhode Island and Indiana have exempted drivers burning kitchen grease from paying such a tax. In North Carolina, the move came at the behest of a state senator who motors around in a small car powered by soybean oil. The legislator said it wasn't paying the taxes that bothered him so much as the hours required to do the paperwork.

Terry Tamminen, an adviser to Schwarzenegger on energy and environmental policy, acknowledged that California has been slow to adapt.

"When you go through a period of change, there is always a clunkiness to the bureaucracy," he said.

But he said the state should not overlook the value of alternative-fuel pioneers.

"Our mentality is to look for the next silver bullet" to replace petroleum, Tamminen said by telephone while driving a car fueled by compressed natural gas. "But there is no silver bullet, only buckshot. We are going to need every one of these silver buckshots to be developed as best it can."

 

 

GREAT TITS LOVE GLOBAL WARMING

Finally, an article on global warming I thought I could get my teeth into, but I just could not get a firm grasp on the global warming part.  I will try to get a better hold on this subject later, and if find my grasp slipping,  I may have to sleep on it, and dwell over it again in the morning. I may have to look into this closely, look behind the article to find what supporting facts are holding up this matter.   Oh well, sometimes, things are not as they sound.  --John--

GREAT TITS LOVE GLOBAL WARMING

by Roger Highfield, Science Editor, Telegraph.co.uk on line

Climate change has already produced shifts in the distribution of some species, such as amphibians, grasses, migratory birds and butterflies, and by one estimate around one million species worldwide are in danger of extinction over the next half century.

But the great tit (Parus major) has changed its behaviour to take climate change in its stride, according to research by scientists from the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh.

Great tit nestling ready to leave the nest. Synchronization between the date of hatching and the date of caterpillar peak abundance in the environment is very important for the survival prospects of nestlings   The reason for extinctions are many fold. For some species there will no longer be anywhere with a suitable climate for them to survive; in other cases they may be unable to reach distant regions where the climate is suitable. Other species may survive elsewhere only to face new threats, notably if the new area is covered by crops or urban sprawl. But the study of data that goes back 47 years on the great tits in Wytham Woods, (Wytham Woods must be a very popular Great Tit watching area, wonder if you have to make reservations?--John--) near Oxford, published in Science by Anne Charmantier and colleagues shows that the birds have modified their breeding schedule over the years to adapt to the warming climate. The birds are now laying their eggs, on average, two weeks earlier than half a century ago. The change enables them to make the most of seasonal food: a bonanza of caterpillars that now also occurs around two weeks earlier due to warmer spring temperatures. Newly hatched great tits. Syncronisation between the date of hatching and the date of caterpillar peak abundance is very important for the survival prospects of nestlings   In this great tit population, female birds are able to adapt their behaviour from year to year to respond to changing environmental conditions," says Prof Ben Sheldon, senior author of the study. "They have been able to keep track with the changes that have happened over recent decades, showing that population responses to climate change can be driven by the adaptability of individuals rather than genetic changes." Population numbers have roughly doubled since 1960, in line with a general increase in numbers of great tits across the country. (Like the sound of that--John--)   While the data from nearly 10,000 breeding reports shows an overall trend of birds laying eggs earlier in response to warmer spring temperatures, there is surprisingly little variation between individual females as their behaviour closely follows the 'early bird' trend, as if all the birds "know" how to cope

But not all great tits are responding the same way. (Tell me about it!--John--)  Prof Sheldon comments: "While our study shows how important it is to be able to adjust behaviour from year to year, the lack of variation between individuals in their response to climate change is surprising and contrasts with a recent study of Dutch great tits - which found a much greater variation in flexibility between individual birds.  (I for one would welcome more study on Great English Tits and Great Dutch Tits--John)

Little is known about the basis of this sort of behavioural adaptability and why it can vary within species. More work is also needed to discover whether the close matching of the changing environment found by the birds in our study is, indeed, unusual."

Co-author Dr Loeske Kruuk of Edinburgh adds: "If temperatures continue to rise, we do not know whether the birds will be able to track the advancing food peak so closely; although up to now they have kept up remarkably well, we don't know what will happen once temperatures rise to yet higher levels."

One recent study in the journal Nature predicted that climate changes over the next half century will eventually make a quarter of land animals and plants extinct, unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced.

"Although the current study shows that some populations may have the innate ability to respond immediately to changing environmental conditions, it is very likely that there are limits on this ability to change, and we may well soon reach a point at which populations fail to keep up," says Dr Kruuk.

The bird is a common species throughout Europe and Asia in any sort of woodland and is found throughout the UK (except for the Northern Isles and Western Isles of Scotland).  (This cannot be right, I have it from reliable sources that there are Great Tits in Scotland!--John)

Prev: Thankful

SORRY TO RUIN THE FUN, BUT AN ICE AGE COMETH

I was reading our good friend, and one of the last true cavemen, Cavey's blog, about all the things that global warming is, can, and will cause.  Reading his reminded me of this article I came across this past week. An alternative view of our climate today.  The author puts all of his information, from global warming, to The Little Ice Age, The Medieval Warm Period, Sunspots, and historical records.  I think you will find this article very interesting to say the least.  And without the Medieval Warm Period, we wouldn't have the wonderful history of the Vikings!  (I have to give it to the Aussies, I find some of the most interesting and thought provoking articles and information from their news sites) 

It is on the long side, but I hope you enjoy the article   JohnOh

 

SORRY TO RUIN THE FUN,

BUT AN ICE AGE COMETH

by: Phil Chapman --  April 23, 2008 -- The Australian

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

----This link is the site mentioned, for the sunspot activity, http://www.spaceweather.com/   also interesting for sun photos through different filters AND a fantastic series of Rainbow pictures and rare rainbow effects from around the world -- John--

 It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.

Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.

There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.

The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.

The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.

By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.

Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.

If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.

For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.

We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.

We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.

The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.

All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinders and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.

It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.

In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.

 

For More Information on The Little Ice Age, and The Medieval Warming  following are some links --John

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=10046   On The Brink of a new Little Ice Age? --  Woods Hole Institute

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/resource1000.html     NOAA National Satellite and Information Service

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455   Abrupt Climate Change -- Woos Hole Institute

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1505/features/lia.htm  Hot Planet Cold Comfort -- Scientific American Frontiers  PBS

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/vikings_during_mwp.html  The Vikings During the Medieval Warm Period --

 

NO MORE GORE'S WARMING WARNING??

A very interesting alternative view on the Global Climate,  I have never thought that we were completely reponsible, as some are saying.  That being stated that does not let us off the hook for improving what we as a species have done and are doing to our blue water home.  Hope you enjoy the article.  Then you can decide whether to buy stock in sun screen and summer wear, or thermal underwear and winter gear.  -- John

 

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
--Benjamin Disraeli--

 

The Sun Also Sets

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

"It used to be so easy to go to the corner store!"

 

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.

Most radio-telescope are built in the middle of nowhere. Rumor has it that a very lonely radio-telescope technician coined the term "headlights".

 

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."

But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.