I don’t want to pick on John Armstrong but the flaws in his argument keep getting bigger and bigger.
In justifying National’s ETS he said
It firmly believes something had to be done to safeguard the country’s export trade – or New Zealand would otherwise face mounting consumer resistance to goods transported from afar.
Farmers – amazingly – have seemed to be blinkered to this danger to their livelihoods.
Research by Otago University just released confirms that this ‘danger’ does not exist.
The research project surveyed 251 shoppers leaving a UK supermarket shows that the amount of CO2 produced getting these products to the shelf was of no concern to 95% of them.
Farmers were not ‘blinkered’ to this danger, they did not subscribe to it, and the evidence now shows they were right to disbelieve claims that we needed an ETS to satisfy overseas consumers. I said it before they don’t give a damn.
So why is National so keen to have an ETS it has to make false claims? These claims they knew were unsubstantiated to say the least, false to say the most. At the very least the entire National front bench is being shown to be complete clowns by subjecting NZer’s to major expense to satisfy a concern that was never real. Did they not think to check it out? How hard can it be to stand outside a supermarket and ask a few questions? To not do so was negligent.
It also speaks volumes about a lapdog media that do not question the Govt when they make these claims. A media’s role is to question and scrutinise, they are not doing their job. When it comes to the matter of the ETS and the matter of our livestock emissions, their impotence makes them complicit in the fraud and no more than the publishers of propaganda.
Every claim should be scrutinised until it is either substantiated or dismissed.
That is what I say about enteric methane, check it out, do the research before you act on unsubstantiated assumptions.
Two recent studies have torn apart two major arguments used by the Govt and the UN. At Copenhagen tears were shed over poor Tuvalu because it was sinking into the sea, this was the poster boy reason urgent action was needed.
A study since released shows the Islands are rising, not sinking. That ends that argument.
Now the study of UK shoppers, they don’t give a toss about CO2 emissions and that ends Nick Smith’s argument for the need for an ETS based on consumer concerns. (I bet even less would care if they were told that most of these supposed CO2 emissions aren’t even real).
Assumptions about methane continue. A study would end that as quickly and as definitively as the other two. It is so frustrating because that is what I want to achieve, I need NZ farmers to want this as well. It will take money, but not a lot of it; it will have to be farmer’s money because no one else will fund it. Please ask your friends to support us so that we can do this. $50 from every farmer and the cries that enteric methane is polluting our atmosphere and cooking the globe will be silenced for ever.
Send them this post and get them involved, we need them.
THE PUZZLE OF COW FLATULENCE – NEW RESEARCH
It is a puzzle that a cow in New Zealand can cause Anthropogenic Global Warming, but a cow in India does not. I applied for a research grant to sudy this question and was granted one.
First I examined the fact that NZ cows are Southern Hemisphere and Indian cows are Northern Hemisphere. Perhaps farts emerge clockwise instead of anti-clockwise? I soon dismissed this possibility because it is evident that cows in France also cause AGW and they are NH also.
Next to examine was the fact Indian cows are sacred, and maybe God allowed them to fart without causing AGW. To put this to the test, I contacted MAF and asked if I invited a Hindu priest to bless our cows, would they qualify for a dispensation from blame for AGW? I was given short shrift. Of course this does not mean the hypothesis is incorrect, just that it wouldn’t be accepted no matter how correct it was. Of course I can see that if our cows were blessed this way, that every country would be able to do it and governments would then be denied the right to tax cows.
Next line of enquiry was whether our cows are fenced in, and Indian cows have right of way everywhere. But it didn’t seem logical because they both eat grass and it wouldn’t make any difference where that grass came from, behind a fence or in the open. Wait a minute! This was an important point. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. So our grass must be greener than Indian grass? Sorry, this does not work because our cows always eat on this side of the fence where the grass is not greener.
My next line of enquiry was whether milking a cow to obtain food causes the flatulence from that cow to be of an AGW nature. At last, I am beginning to get a match of the theory to the facts. So in India, a cow’s milk is drunk by a calf as it is in NZ. But in NZ the cows are milked after the calf is weaned and maybe this extra milking causes the flatulence to contribute to AGW? The evidence on this theory was not clear cut, and at worst would mean our cows are only half AGW (the period after calf weaning and before winter drying off).
While it might look that I was coming to a dead end, there was mounting evidence from the research that both a NZ cow and an Indian cow actually contribute the same amount of farts, and therefore both warm the planet equally. The scientific difference is that the Indian cow contributes to global warming and the NZ cow does the same but this is associated with humans because humans drink the milk and milk products, and use the meat, offals and hide when the cow is replaced with a newer model. The Indian cow causes GW, while the NZ cow causes AGW.
The study then turned to whether the planet would be affected differently by having one less NZ cow or one less Indian cow? And there was little difference between the two options. Because this was so hard for the IPCC to choose one over the other, they checked their “Terms of Reference” and concluded their job was to prove the AGW theory. So they reached the conclusion that agriculture is bad because it serves the purpose of humans. My work did not reach this conclusion.
This study is in the process of peer review, and subject to its publication, I will be able to apply for a grant to do a follow up study. This relates to whether Indian cows also serve a human purpose by satisfying the need of humans to have sacred objects. If this was the case, then it would follow that Indian cows also contribute to AGW, which would please the Indian Government no end because the cows could be taxed. The people to pay would be all those who believed cows were sacred.
Alan Sutherland
July 2010