Papers from the Managing Climate Change: Practicalities and Realities in a post-Kyoto Future conference held in Canberra on 4th April are now available at Tech Central Station.
This is perhaps a first conference where acknowledged ‘climate skeptics’ including Professor Bob Carter have given papers alongside Australian government representatives including Dr Brian Fisher from ABARE.
A delegate from the Chinese embassy spoke about the need for China to reduce its reliance on coal as an energy source and China’s intension to build possibly 6 new nuclear power stations over the next 15 years.
Senior Cliamte Negotiator from the US Department of State gave an interesting and fairly technical paper on US policy directions.
Papers also include a contribution from author of Taken by Storm and key contributor to the ‘hockey stick’ debate, Canadian Ross McKitrick.
The conference papers are supplemented with Background papers that include an analysis of global carbon trading prospects.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
Ross McKitrick paper is pretty poor, he uses Christie and Spencer MSU data to discredit the ‘hockey-stick’ and implies that the MSU data is somehow more valid than that collected from other sources. He fails to tell the reader that Christie and Spencer have published at least 7 papers indentifing and correcting errors in their analysis of the MSU data set and subsequent researchers have, from the same data set, produced results showing a slight warming over the short time period that MSU data has been collected.
McKitrick should have discussed the difficulties of interpreting the MSU data, numerous MSU calibration problems, the compensation for satellite orbit decay, etc. Also when the MSU data for the mid-troposphere is expolated to the lower-troposphere the problems and uncertainities are amplified.
If these items are taken into account then the implied validity of the MSU temperatures is called into question.
I look forward to getting access to the papers on climate issues and reading them.
I’ve got little faith in most of the stuff that comes via the newspapers.