Noooooo, leave the opera house alone...

Noooooo, there are bad ideas, worse ideas, terrible ideas, and things better left unsaid because people will think that you are the biggest moron in the history of the universe.... Opera House and botanical gardens? leave them alone thank you, they work quite well as they are....

The architect Ken Woolley has gone one better, with a proposal that would allow the Opera House complex to stage the grandest of grand operas without remaking either the opera theatre or concert hall. His idea is to build a 1800-seat opera theatre next to the Opera House, partly over the harbour and partly into the Botanic Gardens. He says this could be done for $400 million.

Woolley admits his idea will not appeal to all. "Some critics will feel it compromises Utzon's original vision, while others will say it just will not work … It does demand courage. Only the brave would dare build something near the sacred monument."

New Opera House somewhere else in Sydney, knock yourselves out, just leave this building alone...

The Global Cooling Canard

Thanks to the work of John Fleck, William Connolley, and Tom Peterson, here's hoping the global cooling "argument" can finally be put to rest...

RealClimate: "During the period we analyzed, climate science was very different from what you see today. There was far less integration among the various sub-disciplines that make up the enterprise. Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing. The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales."

Biofuel boom threatens food supplies: Nestle

It's one thing when I say that biofuels can be a dangerous thing, but maybe if people hear it from a food company...

Biofuel boom threatens food supplies: Nestle: "Corn grows in a farm field near Seneca Illinois. Growing use of such crops wheat and corn to make biofuels is putting world food supplies in peril the head of Nestle the worlds biggest food and beverage company warned Sunday.

'If as predicted we look to use biofuels to satisfy 20 percent of the growing demand for oil products, there will be nothing left to eat,' chairman and chief executive Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said.

'To grant enormous subsidies for biofuel production is morally unacceptable and irresponsible,' he told the Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag."

Black carbon pollution emerges as major player in global warming

Posted without comment:

Black carbon pollution emerges as major player in global warming: "Black carbon, a form of particulate air pollution most often produced from biomass burning, cooking with solid fuels and diesel exhaust, has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates, according to scientists in an upcoming review article in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego atmospheric scientist V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2. The researchers also noted, however, that mitigation would have immediate societal benefits in addition to the long term effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The article, “Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon,” will be posted in the online version of Nature Geoscience on Sunday, March 23."