Category: Environment

Nothing is going to stop the ROK government from putting on the best Winter Olympics that they possibly can, not even 500 year old trees:

Campaigners in South Korea have accused organisers of the 2018 winter Olympics of destroying a “sacred” forest to make room for a ski slope, and dismissed official assurances that the site will be restored to its original state after the Games.

Environment groups say the recently-completed removal of tens of thousands of trees from the slopes of Mount Gariwang, including ancient and rare species, amounts to an ecological disaster.

The site in the country’s north-east will host several days of Alpine skiing events during the Games in Pyeongchang, which will become only the third place in Asia to host the winter Olympics after Sapporo and Nagano in Japan.

The row between environmentalists and the Olympic organisers centres on a 500-year-old mountain forest that some South Koreans consider sacred due to its connections to the Chosun ruling dynasty.

Green Korea United claims that the removal of tens of thousands of trees will inflict irreparable damage on the area’s delicate ecosystem.  [The Guardian]

You can read the rest at the link, but since Green Korea United is involved in this I would take their claims with a grain of salt since they were involved in the bogus USFK water dumping scandal.  Additionally it was alleged that environmental groups like Green Korea had ties to North Korea back during the Il Shim Hue spy scandal a few years ago.

Not that Greenpeace has much creditability, but they are primarily blaming South Korea for air pollution over the peninsula instead of China:

Greenpeace challenged a common perception among Koreans that most air pollution comes from China, Wednesday, claiming that Korea is responsible for more than half of its particle-laden smog.

“Despite what is widely reported through the Korean media, from 50 to 70 percent of particle-laden smog, which is also known as PM2.5, is generated within the country,” the environmental group said at a press conference in Seoul.

“Yet the Korean government irresponsibly passes the blame on to China without having any strategies to tackle the problem itself.”

Greenpeace claim that the government has little understanding of PM2.5, which results in policies that will continue to increase pollution.

Greenpeace said that among all sources of air pollution, the nation’s 53 coal power plants should be identified for action

“But the government plans to build 13 more coal plants by 2021, while 11 are under construction,” Greenpeace said. “We wonder why the government remains passive in developing renewable energy sources.”

Greenpeace states that Korea relies on coal plants for 39 percent of its energy production and is the fourth biggest coal importer in the world.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but if they are talking every day air pollution then of course South Korea is primarily responsible.  However, if they are trying to infer that the yellow dust is primarily caused by South Korea than that is deceptive.  Most of the health problems from air pollution happen in Korea because of the seasonal yellow dust that indisputably comes from China.

There is a lot of things to like about living in South Korea, but the yellow dust has to be one of the worst aspects of living on the peninsula:

Image from the Korea Herald.

The worst winter seasonal yellow dust in five years blanketed the Korean Peninsula on Monday, prompting the authorities to issue health warnings against the sandy, chemical-laden wind from China.

According to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), yellow dust warnings were issued at 10 a.m. in Incheon, Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and part of Gangwon Province with dust advisories in place for most other parts of the peninsula except some southeastern cities, including Busan and Ulsan.

The dust warnings in the capital area were to be lowered to advisories at 4 p.m. as the number of fine dust particles gradually decreased.

A yellow dust advisory is issued when an hourly average dust concentration of more than 400 micrograms per cubic meter is expected to last for more than two hours. More than 800 micrograms leads to a yellow dust warning.

People are advised to stay indoors when yellow dust advisories or warnings are in place. When going outside, they are advised to wear protective glasses and yellow-dust masks.

As of 4 a.m., Seoul’s atmospheric concentration levels of “particulate matter (PM)-10” pollutants soared to 1,044 micrograms per cubic meter. This marks the worst yellow dust that has hit the peninsula during a winter season since Dec. 25, 2009, when the level recorded 963 micrograms.  [Yonhap]

I have always wondered how much of an effect on weather patterns that the yellow dust has in the region and there are actually scientists trying to figure that out.  In fact these scientists think the increase in yellow dust could be responsible for up to 80% of global warming.  Here is a map with satellite measurements of the yellow dust reaching the US:

For those that don’t know the yellow dust gets blown in from the Gobi desert where overgrazing of grassland is turning large areas of it into desert.  To make matters worse a lot of industrial pollutants from China’s factories are dumped in the desert and contribute to the amount of air pollutants that get blown over neighboring countries.  This is a provable man-made environmental catastrophe which little is done about.

Plane crazy: Global warming alarmists are taking HOW many private jets to World Economic Forum? http://t.co/lcWQyRMhVf

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) January 20, 2015

UPDATE #2: Japan Probe has news and pictures that the Sea Shepherd eco-loons attacked the Japanese whalers with an acid attack. That may explain why the whalers are so pissed off and holding the two eco-loons.

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UPDATE #1: The Japanese reversed their decision and are not going to release the two eco-loons now:

Sea Shepherd founder and Steve Irwin captain Paul Watson said today he had received an email from the Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) which said a halt to protests by the ship was a condition of returning his crew.

“They are saying that we have to agree to not take any action against their whaling activities, not to video or photo their whaling activities and want us to send a boat – a small zodiac – 10 miles over the horizon to pick up my crew, which I am not going to do,” Mr Watson said.

“It endangers the life of the crew, to put them out in these waters in a small boat, 10 miles out of view. So I am not going to meet these demands.

“When you hold hostages and make demands, that is the definition of a terrorist organisation, and that is the way they are acting.” [News.com]

Paul Watson would know a thing or two about being a terrorist organization considering his own bombing campaigns and arrest warrants for him in multiple countries. This could turn into a very interesting diplomatic battle if the Japanese take the detained intruders back to Japan. I doubt it would get that far but who knows if these Sea Sheppard loons keep causing trouble.

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Things are heating up in the high seas of the southern ocean as the eco-terrorists from the Sea Shepherd Society are claiming the Japanese have taken two of their members hostage:

TWO anti-whaling activists from a protest ship, an Australian and a Briton, are being held hostage aboard a Japanese whaling vessel in an escalation of the whaling wars in the Southern Ocean.

Benjamin Potts, 28, of Sydney, and Giles Lane, 35, from Britain, crew members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel Steve Irwin, boarded the Japanese whaling vessel Yushin Maru No 2 about 5pm (AEDT) yesterday to deliver a plea to stop killing whales.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society international director Jonny Vasic said the two men were tied to a radar mast in freezing conditions for up to three hours after their capture, a claim denied by Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which is running the whale hunt. [AFP]

These eco-terrorists must have read the handbook of fellow terrorist group Al Qaeda and claim torture when you are captured because the media will echo it enough that people will eventually believe it. The Japanese had every right to restrain them and lock them in an office because remember these are the same people who rammed their ship and threw acid at the Japanese whalers last year and lied about it. Plus the boarding of the ship is can be construed as piracy especially when the ship they are on flies a pirate flag.

It is interesting that Sea Shepherd even found the Japanese whalers because they were having a little inter-anti-whaling war with the Greenpeace that would not help them with the location of the Japanese fleet. Fortunately a whale decided to show them the way:

Greenpeace declined to comment on Esperanza’s position, but the western location confirmed Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson’s belief that the whalers were likely to be working north of Prydz Bay, in the Co-operation Sea, where he was headed.

He also said a whale showed him the way. Yesterday a large humpback whale surfaced beside the Steve Irwin and seven times raised his long flipper into the air, and seven times brought it down pointing in a direction due west, as if to say go this way.” [The Age]

Folks, I can’t make this stuff up. So the next time you see a whale raise his flipper in the air you know he must be pointing at a Japanese whaler somewhere. The Sea Shepherd crew isn’t the only ones providing high seas eco-loon comedy:

The only smell that turns me on is the smell of diesel. This is why, especially at night, I used to go down to the Engine Room, stroke my engines, then dip my hands into the diesel. Unfortunately, I was caught in action one night, so I had to think of other ways to make it look more natural. This is why every now and again, I start breaking engines into pieces, only to reassemble them again. Not that there is anything wrong with our propulsion system on board, or because of lack of maintenance, but this is the only way for me to get my hands dirty in diesel oil.

This is a personal blog entry from a member of the crew of the Greenpeace ship named Bent. If his picture isn’t the definition of a eco-loon I don’t know what is:

Australian blogger Tim Blair says, maybe the whale was really trying to warn the Sea Shepherd crew to stay away from Greenpeace’s Bent. That might be a good idea. Anyway the two Sea Shepherd members detained by the Japanese are going to be released. After a call from the Australian Foreign Minister to Japan the Japanese have agreed to release the two and hopefully not to Bent.

Some more interesting information coming out of Australia is that they passed a law banning Japanese whaling in the Australian Antarctic Territory. There is only one problem next to no one recognizes the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australia claims 42% of Antarctic territory, yes I said 42% they are claiming! Only Britain, New Zealand, Norway, and France recognizes Australia’s claim because they have big claims themselves:

Is it any wonder why the vast majority of the world does not take their claim seriously? It is also why the Australian government will not send the Royal Australian Navy to arrest the whalers because they know that in an international court they will lose. So the court decision by the Australian court is nothing more then empty rhetoric.

Some more empty rhetoric from the Australian government is the customs ship they were going to send to monitor Japanese whaling and make a case at an international court against the Japanese. Like I said before they won’t take a case to international court because they would lose and that might explain why the custom ship has not even arrived yet in Antarctic waters and the Japanese are about ready to head back home. Like I said empty rhetoric, but the press and the public continue to buy it.

Another blow to the eco-loons is that the leading environmentalist and Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has come out and said Japanese whaling is not a environmental conservation issue and that the hunted whale populations are sustainable:

ENVIRONMENTALIST and 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery has declared his support for the hugely unpopular Japanese whaling program.

As Australia prepares to monitor the whaling fleet in Antarctica amid rising diplomatic tensions with Japan, Professor Flannery says there is nothing unsustainable about its annual cull of up to 1000 whales – particularly the common minke whale.

“In terms of sustainability, you can’t be sure that the Japanese whaling is entirely unsustainable,” Professor Flannery told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s hard to imagine that the whaling would lead to a new decline in population.” [The Daily Telegraph]

The next time anyone brings up whaling as an environmental conservation issue I will direct them to this quote from Flannery even though I have repeatedly linked to whale populations compared to the numbers hunted as evidence. So since it is not a territorial issue and it is not an environmental conservation issue than what is the remaining reason for attacking Japanese whaling?

The only reason left is that the whales are smart and cute which is what the anti-whaling people believe. They literally think whales are the people of the sea and it is cannabalism to eat them. However, such reasoning does not motivate the public at large to come out and support the anti-whaling campaign. The anti-whaling groups know this and thus have to rely on spreading disinformation that the Japanese are hunting the last whales into extinction and violating Australian territorial rights.

I have long said that negotiations with the Japanese that would allow them to catch a quota of whales every year commercially at numbers probably lower than what they are whaling now through the IWC could be reached. However, when one side is against whaling period and sends ships to attack the Japanese it has caused the Japanese to make this issue one of nationalism that they will not back down from which is making any agreement impossible. This is an issue in need of statesmanship but when your statesman is someone like Bent expect only more comedy and idiocy to continue.

Yes it is man made by a political partisan at NASA:

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or “jump” in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an “oversight” that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place.  1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.  Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

So of you out there may be wondering what the big deal is about this.  Here is what the big deal is:

All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely. What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man. In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.

The discovery of what could be argued was an intentional error by Hansen to support his political beliefs means that global warming now matches prior natural warming periods such as the one that happened in the 1930’s.

The global warming religionists are down playing this by saying that Hansen was only responsible for producing US climate numbers, which is true, but US climate numbers were long considered the most reliable in the world.  If Hansen’s incorrect numbers were considered highly reliable than how bad are everyone else’s numbers?  Something else I learned from all this is that when looked at in five year blocks the globe is undergoing global cooling now:

More importantly for climate purposes, the longer term US averages have not changed rank. 2002-2006 (at 0.66 ºC) is still warmer than 1930-1934 (0.63 ºC – the largest value in the early part of the century) (though both are below 1998-2002 at 0.79 ºC).

Temperatures in the past five years have actually dropped from the previous five year block and temperatures now are comparable to the temperature average during the last global warming period in the 1930’s.  This revelation is a huge danger to the global warming religion, associated industries, and their socialist allies.

But then again what do these facts matter when global warming has long ago become a matter of faith?

You can read a whole lot more over at Ace and Malkin’s sites.

I you haven’t seen them yet, Jack Hanna Nomad has some great pictures of a wildlife encounter during one of his fishing trips.

It took a while, but Korean scientists have discovered that the Han River is polluted:

Non-point pollution refers to environmental deterioration of pollutants from urban residence, roads, farms and construction sites. It is created when rain falls or snow melts, with the runoff picking up and carrying topsoil, bacteria, fertilizers, pesticides, oil and many other toxic or harmful materials and depositing them into various water sources. It is so called because it is difficult to determine a single, polluting source. As land development accelerates and areas where water cannot permeate increases, such pollution is emerging as a new environmental challenge.

According to the Ministry of Environment, non-point pollution accounts for 30-35 percent of water pollution in South Korea; if environmental deterioration from decrepit sewage and untreated animal urine is included, the number could increase to 42-69 percent.

The team is led by Oh Jae-il, a professor majoring in Housing and Environmental Engineering, and conducted the research between 2004 and 2005, by analyzing the degree of pollution in runoff water collected from Yoenhyo Brigde, one of the bridges crossing the Han River.

Silly me, here was all this time thinking USFK was the reason the Han River was polluted.  What I want to know is when is someone going to study the effects of the sewage sucking trucks dumping their loads in the river?

I kind of like the Make A Liberal Friend Your Enemy Package.  What a great idea.  Any thoughts?

HT: Tim Blair

From Reuters:

Jeff Stith of the National Center for Atmospheric Research communicated with reporters via Web chat from a research jet flying 40,000 feet above the ocean as part of a mission to track dust and pollution particles blown from Asia to the United States.

“We have found enhancements in pollution levels in some of the upper regions of the storm clouds we studied, just yesterday for example,” Stith wrote.

Stith and his ground-based colleague, V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, aimed to study the interaction between the pollution and dust with high-altitude clouds bearing ice crystals.

Ice crystals are found in extremely cold clouds, and when the crystals are composed entirely of frozen water, they reflect lots of sunlight — that’s why these clouds look so white, Ramanathan said by telephone after the Web chat.

However, if particles of dust and a dark pollutant known as black carbon managed to get inside the crystals, these clouds might absorb more solar energy rather than reflecting it all, Ramanathan said.

You can see interviews with the two scientists here and here, but they say the significance of this dust mixed with Asian pollution blowing across the Pacific, is that they believe it effects weather patterns by influencing precipitation levels once the clouds reach the US. They also believe the dust and pollution is possible for anywhere from 20%-80% of global warming.

Here is computer enhanced image of the dust and pollution crossing the ocean from the PACDEX website:

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It seems like the dust has been getting worse nearly every year, maybe some of you Korea old-timers can verify if the dust was as bad 20-30 years ago as it is now. It will be interesting to see what the scientists findings are once they complete their research.