Template vs Reality

Global warming to devastate Europe first

Europe has to continue to lead worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but this report also underlines that strategies are needed at European, regional, national and local level to adapt to climate change, says Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the EEA, based in Denmark. This is a phenomenon that will considerably affect our societies and environments for decades and centuries to come

What the report shows is that, if we go on as we are, we have less than 50 years before we encounter conditions which will be uncharted and potentially hazardous, she told the BBC.

Yeah, right...and Malthus told us we'd all be eating Soylent Green by now too.

So far 123 countries, including all the EU member states, have ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce their emissions of six greenhouse gases by 5 per cent by 2012

Of course, if you actually consider SIGNING as important as DOING, then you'd be thick enough to accept this malarkey. Check this article to see that the Europeans may talk a good game, but they haven't lived up to what they already signed anyway.

European Union coal subsidies extended
On July 25, the very same week that world leaders signed up to a modified Kyoto protocol in Bonn, and lambasted the United States for declining to do the same, the European Union had an opportunity to do something tangible about global warming.

For years EU governments have been subsidising coal, the filthiest and most carbon-intensive fuel, for electricity generation.

The sums involved are huge. From 1995 to 1998, Germany, France and Spain alone provided over $23 billion of state support for coal production. Britain under the Conservatives and to start with New Labour has sinned less in this respect, although last year the Blair government doled out $200 million to RJB mining the successor to the former British Coal.

Recognising this the EU agreed some time ago to phase out all such subsidies by 2002.

So what did the saviours of the planet do on July 25? You've guessed. They decided to delay the phase out for another ten years!

If you really thought you'd be the first to get scorched by the Sun in 50 years, you'd do best to set a great example for the rest of us. But not so, let's pile on.

The EU as a whole is committed to reducing emissions by 8% on their 1990 levels by between 2008 and 2012.

On present trends, it appears to stand almost no chance of keeping its promise.

The prominent UK global warming sceptic Professor Philip Stott commented: "One of the most galling things about the whole climate change debate has been European duplicity.
"While lecturing everybody else, especially America, on the morality of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it has been abundantly clear from the start that most European countries didn't have a snowflake in hell's chance of meeting their own Kyoto targets."

Secondly, anyone want to wager which country is developing the best emissions reducing technology? Hint, you can't work 35/hours a week and shrink your population and expect to be very successful.
But here comes the best two parts...

But the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases - the US - has refused to sign.

and the descent into utter stupidity...

Climate change is as big a threat to people and the planet as international terrorism.

Blazing Saddles Meets Global Warming

We've uncovered details from the top secret Kyoto II negotiations underway in Europe.

You cannot stop a sheep belching or farting, but you can make sure its eructations are less damaging to the environment.
Belches and, to a far lesser degree, farts from sheep, cows and other farm animals account for around 20% of global methane emissions. The gas is a potent source of global warming because, volume for volume, it traps 23 times as much heat as the more plentiful carbon dioxide.
To protect the planet from such ruminant effusions, a team led by Andre-Denis Wright of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Perth, Western Australia, has developed a vaccine against the archaean microbes that produce methane in sheep rumens

Too bad that vaccine wasn't available for this infamous campfire meeting.

Great Moments in Marketing (con't)

A professor in graduate school once told me that BY DEFINITION, all forecasts were going to be wrong...which is another way of saying nobody can predict the future, no one has "special knowledge". But this forecast is so far off as to be worse than useless...as companies execute business plans based on what is apparently a giant mirage.

Leave it to the third largest Itanium server shop to put things in perspective.

A recent IBM presentation has helped show just how disappointing Itanium server sales have been. Sen Ming Chang, an IBM staffer, collected all of the IDC Itanium forecasts from 1997 through 2003 and plotted something that could be called the great leveling. Where IDC once predicted more than $30bn in Itanium server sales by the end of 2001, it now sees sales barely reaching the $7bn mark by 2007.

As The Register recently pointed out, a onetime IDC Itanium forecast for 2004 has come in a stunning 96 percent off the mark. We'll let that figure sink in for a moment. Remember IDC specializes in crunching numbers and predicting where various markets will go.

Best Quote:

It could be suggested that a monkey with a nasty crack habit could have been at least 90 percent wrong about Itanic.

Never heard the marketing department described quite like that.