Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for November 2005

Are Australian Cities Getting Hotter?

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The biggest global warming conference since Kyoto, opened today in Montreal, Canada. The 10,000 experts from 180 nations are to spend the best part of the next 10 days deliberating about how best to “slow the alarming effects of greenhouses gases and global warming”.

I had a look at ‘global temperature’ some weeks ago in my post titled ‘Global Warming for Dummies’, click here. I concluded that globally, 2005 may indeed be the hottest year on record. But I didn’t scrutinize my data source – just accepted the NASA data and methodology.

Not everyone is convinced that it is getting hotter.

At this blog I encourage the contrarian position. To quote David Tribe, “It’s how we treat our contrarians that tells us whether we are living in a truely civil society, for the contrarians are very valuable to us, because they point to the places where ‘conventional wisdom’ may be getting it wrong.”

Global warming skeptic Warwick Hughes has had a good look at the data for Australian capital cities at the NASA site. In the following guest post from Warwick Hughes he disputes the main premise of a recent Bureau of Meterology (BoM) media release titled 2005:Australia’s warmest year on record?.

Warwick writes:

The BoM conclusion is based on their specially adjusted data, they choose a start date 1950 which is a cooler part of the record and they ignore all late 19 Century data which in many stations was as warm as recent decades. Furthermore, it seems premature to make claims about 2005 before the year has ended.

A more realistic view of the relative warmth of 2005 placed in century scale perspective is given by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, Station Data, available at,
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/.

GISS is run by Dr James Hansen, who I think it is fair to say, has been a ‘global warming proponent’ since at least 1988. GISS data is built from the USA NOAA group’s global GHCN dataset. Looking at records from the “homogeneity adjusted” data choice of GISS for all the Australian capital cities shows that nowhere can the BoM wish come true.

GISS would have adjusted these urban warming affected city stations taking account of surrounding more rural data. I do not agree with everything GISS does and I comment below where I think fit. However NASA/GISS has vastly more experience than the BoM at evaluating temperature trends from the 19C because their dataset is global and Dr Hansen and his team have published a series of papers on global trends over many years.

Let us look at some Australian examples, city by city, using the NASA/GISS dataset, starting with Perth, view image
(30 kbs).

There is no possibility in Perth that 2005 will be Australia’s warmest year on record. I have people from the WA wheat belt telling me of the worst frost damage to water pipes this year that they have seen for decades.

Adelaide has known many warmer years than 2005. Likewise, if the East Sale record was slid up to compare exactly with Melbourne then it is crystal clear that the BoM will need a very hot couple of months for their proposal to come to pass in south eastern Australia,view image (30 kbs).

It is obvious that 1999, 2000 and 2001 were warmer than 2005 in Hobart so the BoM has no case yet around Hobart that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record, view image(30kbs). Interesting that Maatsuyker Island Lighthouse is showing much less warming than Hobart airport so the adjusted GISS data for Hobart airport may still carry urban warming, further weakening any BoM case.

The best guide for Sydney and Newcastle is to see where 2005 at Williamtown relates to the Newcastle century long data, which is from Nobbies Signal Station, view image (30kbs). From this graph it is obvious that there is no possibility in Sydney and Newcastle that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record. It is equally obvious that the Sydney Airport data, affected as it is by a strong ‘urban heat island’ (UHI) effect, is artificially warming at a rate much faster than Williamtown despite any GISS adjustment.*

Moving north to Brisbane and it is obvious in this region that if the Eagle farm data was ‘merged’ with the old Brisbane Regional Office trend then there is no chance that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record, view image (30kbs).

At this point we have to ask ourselves, “Where in Australia is this unprecedented warming the BoM talking about?”

Checking the circa 125 years of data from Darwin it is obvious that 2005 is a warm year but it was topped by 1998, might equal 1988 and will be topped easily by 1973, view image (30kbs). It is also obvious that if the airport data are merged with the earlier Post Office data then several years 1906 and earlier would have been warmer than 2005. Hence in this area the BoM claim that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record, is not borne out by the data. The GISS team do provide on their web page a full Darwin record splicing the post office and airport but in my opinion it is not one of their better efforts and I prefer my own splice. If anyone prefers the GISS Darwin from 1882 then it makes no difference to the above yearly comparisons.

Moving now to Central Australia for our last graphic, that of the circa 125 year long Alice Springs temperature record. In this case, GISS do not provide a circa 125 year long record in their “homogeneity adjusted” data, but if readers make a graph for Alice Springs from the GISS Dataset listed in their “pull down menu” as “after combining sources at same location”, then you will see a graphic very similar to mine below showing that almost a dozen years have been warmer than 2005, view image (30kbs).

So it seems doubtful that Alice Springs data will provide confirmation for the BoM that “2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record” but the data at years end will tell.

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* Sydney airport is used by the Jones et. al. team at the University of Norwich, to compile the ‘global warming’ trends we all know so well. For my ’20th Anniversary Review’ of the unsound Jones et al 1986 methodologies, see
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cru86/ .

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Warwick Hughes temperature outlook critiques for 2005 are at,
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool14.htm. Temperature Outlook critiques pre 2005 are at, http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/cool8.htm.

C02 Follows Temperature In Bubble Record

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Three fascinating papers were published in Science (Vol 310, 25th November 2005) last week on climate change and the relationship between carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide levels and temperature over the last 650,000 years.

They report on new findings from the European Project for Ice Coring in the Antartica.

A graph in the ‘perspectives section’ by Brook (pg 1286) summarizes the findings,
view image (70 kbs).

The data tells me that:

1. The greenhouse gases are at higher levels now than they have been over the last 650,000 years.

2. Carbon dioxide levels correlated with temperature and have peak during previous interglacial warm periods just below 300ppm, view image (120 kbs).

3. In the past, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have tended to follow, rather than preceded, rises in temperature.

4. We are currently in an interglacial warm period and these periods tend to be followed by very cold periods.

I find the graphs fascinating.

While atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have clearly fluctuated with temperature in the past, they have tended to lag behind temperature. This doesn’t accord with the current perception – what is understood to be the current consensus which is that carbon dioxide drives temperature?

I find the prospect of another ice age really scary. The graphs suggest to me that one is imminent – like in the next few hundred or thousand years? However, greenhouses gases have never been so high.

It is perhaps interesting to ponder …. If we were able to influence climate in a predictable way, and if we could delay indefinitely the onset of the next ice age, should we?

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Many, many thanks to the reader of this blog who sent me copies of the papers. There has been some discussion of the papers at the Real Climate blog, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=221&lp_lang_view=en .

Rising Salt Problem in WA

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A main premise of the following guest post from Boxer* is that across the West Australian wheatbelt, water tables are showing an upward trend. Boxer explains the problem and the need to act now if we are to learn from history and avoid the problems that destroyed, for example, agriculture in the valleys of the once fertile Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

I have asked Boxer for a link to some data that quantifies the extent of the rising water table problem. He has responded that:

There is no single place that I can find where a large amount of water table data is assembled in one place. This is not because there is a paucity of data, but I think because there is so much data, and the fundamental cause and effect of dryland salinity has been so well established for so long, that the publications over the last decade or two do not directly present water table data. The scientific debate has moved on.

If a problem is complex and widespread, all the more reason, in my opinion, to have a few agreed indicators and regularly report on how they are trending. Others may see things differently? The issue is important. Let’s have some discussion. Here’s the post:

Like a number of other people who comment on this blog, I enjoyed Jennifer’s recent piece on Ockham’s Razor (ABC Radio, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1509193.htm ) in which she addressed the arguments of various doomsday prophets such as Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe.

The Prophets of Doom have a list of iconic issues. I think it is healthy for the Prophets to be challenged because they have a vested interest in, for example, arguing that climate change will be the end of all things, just as coal miners have a vested interest in business as usual. Challenge them both.

On the issue of salinity however, I argue that dryland salinity is a major issue for this country. On this one, I am with the doomsday crowd. My vested interest? My professional life is bound up in finding ways for agriculture to adapt to rising water tables and perhaps even find ways to prevent the problem becoming as bad as the models predict.

Jennifer uses the example of the Murray River, where, at a point just upstream from the off-take for Adelaide’s water supply, salinity levels have fallen over the last couple of decades due to salt diversion work. Good news, but is that a reasonable reflection of the state of affairs in the whole river system? I don

Let’s Import Our Fish

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‘Getting in Deeper?’ was the title of a letter to the Courier Mail on Friday which read:

Now that we are going to have to import more fish because of cutbacks to commercial fishing we can expect an increase in Indonesian illegal fishing in our waters to meet the extra demand for imports.

So cynical!

When I read in the The Australian and The Courier Mail last Thursday that a $220 million Federal Government package will be offered to more than 1,000 commercial fisherman as an inducement to exit the fishing industry, I emailed Dr Walter Stark and asked what he thought about it all. I commented that I thought some fisheries were under real stress including the orange roughy, not to mention southern bluefin tuna.

Walter emailed back:

Orange Roughy are very slow growing, have a restricted habitat range on the continental slope and gather in schoals above the bottom where they are easy to detect and catch. Needless to say they are very vulnerable to overfishing. As to the broader issue of halving the Commonwealth licensed fleet because of overfishing, it’s nonsense.

Here are some fishery production figures (in metric tonnes) for 2003, the first is aquaculture the second for wild caught.
Australia 38,559 / 219,473
Vietnam 937,502 / 1,666,886
Malaysia 167,160 / 1,287,084
Thailand 772,970 / 2,817,482
Mexico 73,675 / 1,450,000
Bangaladesh 856,956 / 1,141,241
Philippines 459,615 / 2,169,164
Burma 257,083 / 1,349,169
U.S.A. 544,329 / 4,938,956

The figures speak for themselves, especially in view of our much larger and less impacted coastline and marine environment.

Australia has the world’s third largest Exclusive Economic Zone, behind the United States and France, but ahead of Russia, with the total area actually exceeding that of its land territory. France is so large because of its overseas departments.

In terms of EEZ area Australian fisheries harvest rate is about 1/20 that of the U.S. Australia ‘s continental EEZ area comes to 6,048,681 Km2 and the island territories bring the total to 8,148,250 Km2. Disregarding the latter the wild caught harvest comes to just under 40 Kg/ Km2 per year or 0.4 Kg/Ha.

I don’t think overfishing is much of a threat. The strong impression I received from some pretty impassioned fishermen at the Seafood Directions conference at Sydney in September was that poor catches are not the difficulty. The real problem causing the widespread malise in fisheries is government imposed restrictions, demands and charges.

Tom Marland has commented:

As a result [of the restrictions] retailers will be forced to import more seafood under the Howard Government plan to replenish Australia’s vulnerable fish stocks.

Fisheries Minister Ian Macdonald commented yesterday that “It is a fact well accepted by the industry that there are too many boats chasing too few fish in many of our fisheries.”

Under the proposed plan The Australian Fisheries Management Authority will reduce the allowed catch in 17 key fisheries in southern, eastern and northern waters from next year, and enforce more sustainable fishing practices.

Australian Conservation Foundation marine campaign co-ordinator Chris Smyth said the package was long overdue, given that the number of over fished species had risen from three to 17 since the Howard Government came to power in 1996.

While the fish caught in Australian waters will be reduced, especially in the ‘exploited and depleted’ Great Barrier Reef region it does not make any mention about a decrease in consumer demand for seafood in Australia.

In a recent article written by Walter Stark titled Threats to the Great Barrier Reef it was stated that in regards to the over fishing of the GBR the evidence does not quite stack up.

For instance the GBR currently has a harvest rate of 17kg/km2 compared to other pacific reefs which average 7,700 kg/km2. This may be put down to the fact that the GBR covers a large area. However, currently only 30% of the reef is available to commercial fishing operators which corresponds to 60kg/km2.

So while the bans on commercial fishing will be implemented to ‘rejuvenate’ a comparably under utilised resource in Australian water other reef environments in the Pacific, South East Asia and the Caribbean will be placed under increased pressure from the increased demand from Australian imports.

This position smacks of out of sight out of mind and is a direct ‘exportation’ of Australian environmental responsibility. While Australians will sit down to a smorgasbord over over-priced, over seas imported seafood this Christmas they can sleep well in the knowledge that the GBR and other Australian marine resources are safe to the detriment of over-exploited and environmentally unsustainable international fishing zones.

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Thanks to Tom Marland and Walter Stark for most of the information for this post.

The War Over Whaling Continues

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The MY Esperanza and the MY Arctic Sunrise, equipped with a helicopter, speed boats and hi-tech communications equipment, departed Cape Town harbor last Sunday afternoon for the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

The boats are not part of some expedition by the South Africa navy, rather they are the property of Greenpeace.

Greenpeace plans to stop Japan killing 935 minke whales by positioning its boats (and helicopter) between the harpoons and the whales, click here for the CNN report.

I wonder how much the expedition is costing and how much energy it will expend?

While Greenpeace takes on the whalers at sea, the Humane Society and Australians for Animals are calling for Japan to be hauled before some international court for its ‘crimes against whales’.

Minke whales are abundant. The whales that are killed are eaten. If the Japanese didn’t eat the whale meat I guess they would eat more grain-fed beef or blue fin tuna? It might be more environmentally friendly to eat whale, than beef or depleted blue fin tuna stocks?

What about Greenpeace and the Humane Society focusing their efforts on some of the really endangered animal species that are killed less humanely and not for food – sun bears for example.

The Canberra Times published the following piece by Glenn Inwood yesterday. It is not available online and so I am republishing the complete text below, with the permission of the author:

The International Whaling Commission is a peculiar organisation. While its legally binding mandate given by the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling is to manage whale populations on the basis of scientific findings to “provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry”, it has not made any significant decisions since it agreed what was to be a short-term cessation of commercial whaling in 1982 – the so-called “moratorium” -and the passing of the “Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary” in 1994. Both of these decisions were taken without the support of its own Scientific Committee.

Since then, the organisation has been in peril: its members polarised on one side of the debate or the other, unable to secure the three quarters majority to make legally binding decisions, dysfunctional and always drawing its interminable last breath as members of both sides question its continued relevance.

Whaling nations hunt a small number of whales from a few abundant stocks while anti-whaling nations cry foul using false claims that whales are endangered, that killing them for scientific purposes is unnecessary and throwing outrageous claims of “barbarism” for domestic political purposes. What occurs is, for the timebeing at least, an insurmountable barrier between a Western environmental crusade and international law, which requires States that sign a treaty to interpret and implement it in “good faith”.

This is where Australia currently finds itself. Its stance at the IWC reflects an emotive environmental movement that has continued unchecked for 20 years or more, and has even been encouraged for reasons of political expediency, simply because there is no longer an Australian whaling constituency. But by taking this position, which has required ignoring its legal obligations and twisting the legal interpretation of an international agreement, Australia has sacrificed its reputation as legitimate partner on matters of resource management where international cooperation is required.

Extreme environmental groups, such as Humane Society Australia and Australians For Animals, have been allowed to manipulate public opinion with unbridled passion and misguided concern for many years at the cost of reasoned, scientific debate, forcing the Australian Government into an unenviable corner where its policies related to the management and sustainable use of wildlife are internally inconsistent and contrary to the paradigms of science-based policy and rule making accepted as the world standard. The Northern Territory’s unsuccessful attempt to implement a crocodile safari hunt is testament to this.

HSUS Australia and AFA have opinions that Japan’s research in the Antarctic is not legal under international law. They now want the Government to take their legal opinions and pursue a case against Japan’s research whaling. Environment Minister Ian Campbell has on his hands an environmental movement that is completely out of control, one that is openly supported by most of the country’s media, and they continue to push their Government in a direction it clearly does not want to take. Both the Attorney General and Mr Campbell have repeated said that they will use “diplomatic means”. Either way, this leaves the Australian Government in an untenable position: how to satisfy the now growing discontent of whaling among the public, fuelled by the media and encouraged by the government itself, yet uphold its obligations under international law.

A legal case against Japan is high risk. If Australia did take the case to some international court or tribunal and lost, it would no longer be able to continue its anti-whaling rhetoric. Defence of its position would become unjustifiable and its standing within the IWC would be severely diminished.

Article VIII of International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling is very clear. Any member of the IWC may grant special permits to kill, take and treat whales for the purposes of scientific research and that all such operations shall be exempt from the convention. This means that such things as “the moratorium” or the “Southern Ocean Sanctuary” do not apply to research whaling. And the meat taken from whales that are killed must be processed and therefore sold at market. This is a legal requirement of the Convention. It cannot be any clearer. Further, the research is not carried out in any waters under Australian jurisdiction because Australia’s Antarctic claims are not recognized under international law.

Australia argues, that Article VIII is no longer relevant because there are other ways to study whales without having to kill them. Yes, there are non-lethal means that provide some kinds of scientific information but there are no non-lethal means to obtain data on population age structure and the biological parameters needed for the proper management of whaling. Nor do non-lethal methods provide data on feeding habits, which are required for modelling species interactions and that will allow scientists and managers to move toward the goals of ecosystem-based management. Some nations are proposing that a new international convention be drafted that, among other things, would remove the existing provisions for lethal research and the provisions that allow the lodging of an objection to, and therefore not be bound by, IWC decisions. (Norway’s commercial whaling is conducted legally through an objection to the moratorium.)

The proposal to draft a new convention, which is supported by Australia, is unlikely to be successful and unlikely to achieve the outcome some IWC nations want since it would be binding only on those who sign it. Mr Campbell believes a diplomatic solution is needed to resolve the whaling impasse, and he is right. But this requires good will, understanding and compromise rather than blustering and rhetoric.

Glenn Inwood is a Wellington-based consultant whose company undertakes communications work for the Institute of Cetacean Research in Japan, which carries out that country’s research whaling programmes in the Antarctic and the western North Pacific.

Designed to Be Energy Efficient – or Not?

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Through an agreement with the building sector, the Australian Government has resolved to eliminate worst energy performance practices through a national standard approach to minimum performance requirements for buildings, see Greenhouse Office website.

Based on this advice, the Australian Building Codes Board is set to consider the introduction of five-star energy regulations in all new homes when it meets today.

But the Housing Industry Association say it is all a crock. According to their media release:

The regulations will not deliver a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, nor making significant inroads into energy savings. By 2020 they will have imposed a $31.5 billion cost on Australian families for a saving of just 0.8 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.