Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for January 2006

Out Now: 2006 World Watch Report

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Hi Jennifer,

I haven’t had a look at the full report yet, but you might be interested in this article, about the State of the World report, click here.

It discusses the growing resource needs and eco-impact of China and India into the future, and includes some interesting stats that need challenging and verification.

Steve

…………..

Thanks Steve,

I note the full report can be downloaded here
http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/sow/2006 .

And is prefaced with the comment:

This year, Worldwatch Institute’s annual State of the World report provides a special focus on China and India, examining the global impact as these two nations join the United States and Europe as major consumers of resources and polluters of local and global ecosystems. The report explains the critical need for both countries to “leapfrog” the technologies, policies, and even the cultures that now prevail in many western countries for the sake of global sustainability-and reports on some of the strategies that China and India are starting to implement.

Athol Hodgson on Bushfires

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According to ABC Online news:

Up to 20 properties are feared destroyed or damaged by fires across Victoria, with a number of communities in the state’s west and east under threat.

At least three homes have burnt down near Anakie, west of Melbourne, after a lightning strike started a fire that destroyed more than 6,000 hectares of the Brisbane ranges.

Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) chief fire officer Andrew Greystone says the fire behaviour has prevented crews from assessing further damage.

“We believe that there have been houses and or property lost in the Brisbane ranges and in the Grampians,” he said.

The Grampians fire at Mt Lubra in the west has covered more than 100,000 hectares and threatened the towns of Moyston, Pomonal, Halls Gap and Stawell.

In Gippsland in the east, a deliberately-lit blaze now at 10,000 hectares, has left Moondarra under ember attack and continues to threaten Erica, Rawson and Tyres.

In the north-east, the towns of Yea, Kinglake and Glenburn should maintain ember patrols.

Crews are racing to have the fires contained before Thursday’s return to 40 degree Celsius temperatures.

I have just found and re-read my copy of a speech given by Athol Hodgson in December 2004 at the Eureka Forum in Ballarat. It includes some history and some advice:

The fire event in 1985 when lightning started 111 fires in a pattern similar to the fire event in 2003 is one valid benchmark for learning. The 1985 campaign lasted 14 days and confined the Alpine fires to 50000 ha without the help of rain. It involved 2,000 Departmental, 500 CFA, 449 Armed Services, 120 timber industry and 50 SEC personnel; 75 bulldozers, 400 fire tankers and 36 aircraft. In the aftermath, debriefs were held without rancor or political interference and there was no call for an Inquiry into the event.

In 1985 there was a large work-force of experienced firefighters working in the forests. It included people working on hydro-electricity projects; tree fellers, sniggers and log carters employed by the timber industry; graziers; forest workers building fire access tracks, maintaining roads and tracks, and picking seed for forest regeneration and forest officers supervising forest licensees, forest works and planning autumn prescribed burning for forest regeneration and fuel reduction. That work-force and the vehicles and equipment it used daily in the forests was immediately available on 14 January 1985. A work-force of similar size and experience in fighting fires in the Alpine forests was not immediately available for fire fighting in January 2003.

A top priority for Government to ensure good forest fire management is to put a bigger and permanent workforce into the parks and State forests do the things that must to be done to sustain healthy and diverse forest ecosystems. That workforce must have skills, transport, tools and machinery capable of managing multiple ignitions from lightning as was done in 1985. It is not absolutely necessary to reverse land use decisions to do this but it is necessary to change some current land management practices. The workforce must have a mission appropriate for the approved land use. In parks, the mission must include controlling feral animals, weeds, erosion, keeping access tracks in a condition where they are easily maintained, collecting seed and revegetating damaged sites, planning and conducting prescribed burns and controlling unplanned fires. In State forests where commercial use of vegetation is permitted the mission must include all the above and additional tasks appropriate to the commercial operation.

Another top priority is to restore prescribed burning programs in forests. Immediately after the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 the Government injected $1 million extra into the programs effectively doubling the money available for field staff to do the work. Yet the programs crashed. In 1992 the Auditor General found that the Department of Conservation and Environment had failed to achieve its planned fuel-reduction targets in three consecutive seasons and that those areas the Department identified as warranting the highest level of protection to human life, property and public assets received the lowest level of protection. And in 2003 the Auditor General found that since 1994, fuel reduction burning has never met the Department’s planning and operational fuel-reduction targets. In allowing that to happen, the Department ignored the truism heralded by Judge Stretton in 1939, repeated by Sir Esler Hamilton Barber in 1977 and further reinforced by the Miller Report on the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, that fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forest manager. The Government and the Department must lift their game. They must do so, not only in places where the priority is to protect life and assets. Those places are a very small proportion of the forest estate and to concentrate on them to the exclusion of the rest of the forests will lead inevitably to more feral fires. Prescribed burning has been done successfully in the past on broad areas to create forest diversity and reduce the damaging effects of wildfires. The practice had little community and no political support from the mid-1980’s until 2003 and was the reason why fuel management programs crashed in that era. That support must be won and the practice reinstated in our forests in a safe way.

These two priorities will cost money in large amounts. Victorians must anticipate that contributions to forest fire management from forest industries by way of royalties or in kind will not in the future, be as great as in the mid-1980’s. And visitor fees and similar charges are ‘petty cash’ compared to the many millions of dollars needed to sustain local and largely permanent workforces in rural communities close to where they are needed most. But Victoria’s forests are an asset that requires to be valued by the community in the same way that any other asset is provided with a value that guides its management and protection. The intrinsic values of wilderness, water catchments, biodiversity, cultural sites and the like are valued by the community as much, and often more, as are tangibles like sawlogs and gravel. The community must insist that they be protected and be prepared to pay the cost. The challenge facing the community is to assemble information about forest fire that is based on science, tested by experience and then play it successfully in the political arena. Politicians of all political persuasions are sensitive to environmental issues involving water catchments, forests and fire. Governments will find money for causes supported by communities with political clout. The alternative is more feral fires.

You can read more about Athol Hodgson at Forest Fire Victoria Inc.

Methane from Trees Not Responsible for Global Warming: Frank Keppler

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A week or so ago I explained how researchers had discovered that plants are a source of methane: that a new study led by Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in Germany calculates that all the world’s living vegetation (forests included) emit between 62 and 236 million tonnes of methane per year. This is apparently equivalent to between 10 and 30 per cent of annual global methane emissions.

Now the same researchers are claiming that their findings have been misinterpreted:

The most frequent misinterpretation we find in the media is that emissions of methane from plants are responsible for global warming. As those emissions from plants are a natural source, they have existed long before man’s influence started to impact upon the composition of the atmosphere. It is the anthropogenic emissions which are responsible for the well-documented increasing atmospheric concentrations of methane since pre-industrial times. Emissions from plants thus contribute to the natural greenhouse effect and not to the recent temperature increase known as ‘global warming’. Even if land use practices have altered plant methane emissions, which we did not demonstrate, this would also count as an anthropogenic source, and the plants themselves cannot be deemed responsible.

I guess this approach is consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which defines ‘climate change’ as that which is attributable directly or indirectly to human activity, click here.

So according to Keppler et al. plants are not responsible for what they emit. I guess this means that they are not responsible either for sequesting carbon dioxide. However, we do count carbon sequestration (post 1990) in national greenhouse inventories, so shouldn’t we also count methane emitted from the same plants in the inventory?

Interestingly, in the Nature paper, Keppler et al. state:

In pre-industrial times, that is, without anthropogenic emissions, the relative contribution of methane to the atmosphere by direct plant emissions may have been even larger than today. This could have far reaching implications for the interpretation of atmospheric methane levels and climate signals in the past.

Ecoterrorism: 11 Charged

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According to an online NBC news report the FBI considers ecoterrorism the most widespread and damaging form of domestic terrorism in the US. It has been carried out against forestry activities and against biotechnology (genetically modified plants) and for animal rights. Yesterday 11 ecoterrorists were charged:

“The indictment tells a story of four-and-a-half years of arson, vandalism, violence and destruction claimed to have been executed on behalf of the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front, extremist movements known to support acts of domestic terrorism,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at a news conference Friday.

“There is a clear difference between constitutionally protected advocacy … and violent criminal activity,” Mueller added.

“It is one thing to write concerned letters or to hold peaceful demonstrations,” Mueller said. “It is another thing entirely to construct and use improvised explosives to harass and intimidate victims by destroying property and to cause millions of dollars in losses by acts or threats of violence.”

… A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Eugene accused Paul, a firefighter, of setting firebombs that burned down a horse slaughterhouse in 1997. The ALF claimed responsibility for that fire, which caused an estimated $1 million in damage.

Savoie, who works in a group home for the developmentally disabled, is accused of serving as a lookout for a fire in 2001 that destroyed offices of a lumber mill. The ELF claimed responsibility for that fire.

Ecoterrorists have done more than $100 million in property damage over the past decade, officials told NBC News on Friday.

… Targets included U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, U.S. Bureau of Land Management wild horse facilities, lumber companies, meat processing companies, a ski area and the power line, the indictment said.

Interestingly the terrorists, the media and the Judge don’t appear to distinguish between terrorism for ‘the environment’ and terrorism for ‘animal rights’. To quote from a recent post at this blog: “Animal welfare, animal rights (including animal liberation) and conservation are three independent issues, which are often in conflict. Boundaries need to be placed on each to better understand their role in different context.”

What were the 11 really fighting for?

My Aversion to Whaling is Not Cultural: Libby Eyre

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Libby Eyre sent me the following letter which is really a critique of an article that I wrote for Online Opinion titled No Science and No Respect in Australia’s Anti-Whaling Campaign.

In the letter Libby asks why I put the case for whaling and also quotes some comment from me at this blog. I wrote back explaining that I write to understand issues and that I believe there is too much ‘blind opposition’ to the sustainable harvest of many plant and animal species.

But let’s read what Libby has to say. She is a researcher and museum curator at Macquarie University. She doesn’t like to be called an expert, but as been involved in cetacean research for over 20 years including with wild cetaceans and captive, and also marine mammal events such as strandings. Libby has also worked with Greenpeace including undertaking whale and dolphin surveys on board the Rainbow Warrior.

Dear Jennifer,

I am not quite sure what point you are trying to make with regards to the article “No science and no respect in anti-whaling campaign”. It would appear you are trying to put forward a balanced argument, and you state in comments that you are “motivated by a desire to understand the world around me and try, through my writing, to get as close as possible to the truth”. You also have written that you “care about whales”, and you “don’t like the idea of killing whales”. I am concerned that although you appear to want to report the truth and appear unbiased, comments such as “it is well known I am sympathetic to whaling” would suggest otherwise.

You have written that commercial harvesting uses more humane methods than aboriginal subsistence whaling. You also write later that “Whales are said to die instantly when struck by a harpoon”. There is no guaranteed humane way of killing a large whale at sea. It is difficult enough euthanasing the smaller species in a humane fashion when they are lying on a beach. Although the Norwegian scientists do research on killing techniques and time to death, the current practices used are still able to cause extreme suffering if an accurate hit is not obtained. As there are no independent observers on whaling vessels operated by the Japanese, Norwegians or Icelanders, researchers have to take information provided by these countries on face value. The Norwegians claim they kill >80% of whales instantly, whereas the Japanese instantaneous kill rate is said to be 40%. A significant number of whales in both the Norwegian and Japanese hunts require secondary killing methods, such as high calibre rifles to kill them. When the Japanese kill the 10 fin whales in the Antarctic this year (50 in subsequent years), they will use the same size explosive grenade that they use for minkes, which are about 8 times smaller in size.

With regards to the smaller odontocetes not being regulated by the IWC – the IWC has a small cetaceans sub-committee which meets when the Scientific Committee does prior to the plenary meetings. As you would know, the Scientific Committee is made up of leading cetacean researchers from around the world, who are there due to their knowledge and expertise to advise and provide facts on the state of the cetacean environment, discuss sanctuaries, model populations and work out possible sustainable quotas. The IWC has traditionally been an organization set up by whalers for whalers, however due to the lack of ability to adequately manage whale stocks, and the subsequent crash of great whale populations, a moratorium was in place, and more emphasis was given to the scientific community to model future trends in whale populations. Small cetaceans have not traditionally been viewed in the commercial whaling discussions at the IWC, but the IWC have recognised that there needs to be discussion about these animals, as many are now threatened with extinction. It should be noted that the Japanese are against discussions on small cetaceans as they have never been part of IWC negotiations.

With regards to the consumption of the pilot whale meat in the Faroe Islands, high levels of heavy metals have been found in the meat, and could possibly have severe adverse health effects on those that consume it. It would be a tragedy if these people risked the health of their children because of traditional (and cruelly executed) practices. Persistent organic pollutants have been detected in cetaceans from seemingly remote populations, and the health repercussions of eating products from small and large cetaceans should not be readily dismissed.

You have pointed out that “Norwegian whalers have a long cultural tradition of killing, eating and selling whale products”, and some of the comments on the blog have rightly pointed out that Japan’s history of whaling is mainly post WWII, when they had little else to eat. Some social commentators suggest that the Japanese hang on to the idea of eating whales as it reminds them of the hard times they went through after the War. Traditions are by their nature somewhat emotionally driven, rather than logical. Many past times and events are carried out in the name of tradition when they have been superseded by superior technology or knowledge. Certain cultures would argue that genital mutilation is traditional amongst them, but that doesn’t make it morally right when you consider the pain and suffering the individuals endure. We often hang on to traditions because they remind us the good old days and how things used to be, or perhaps because “it’s always been done that way”. These are emotional rather than logical arguments a lot of the time. Having a long cultural tradition of doing something does not justify its continuation. Using the traditional argument is an emotional tactic similar to what you accuse Senator Campbell of employing.

You wrote that “Norway resumed commercial whaling in defiance of the IWC”, and that the Norwegians maintain that the “harvest is based on scientific advice supported by the best available knowledge”. I wonder what makes their knowledge any more superior than the researchers who gather at the IWC scientific meetings each year? Would not these scientists also have an understanding of population dynamics and numbers?

Pro-whaling supporters say that we can learn a lot of information by studying dead whales. With advances in technology, we can learn more from studying whales alive than dead, including gathering follow-up data on individuals, which of course lethal techniques do not allow. Faecal studies provide the study of diet; biopsies provide a range of information on sex, reproductive state, health, population dynamics; acoustics provide behavioural and population information; photographic research provides individual life history information, migratory patterns, age and health information; tagging provides information on environmental factors such as depth and sea temperature along with acoustics of the subject and surrounds; and so on. The Japanese proposal to kill humpback whales will negatively impact on humpback whale research in areas such as the South Pacific and Australia. Some of these projects have been going for decades. The Japanese have doubled their quota of minke whales to meet the requirements of their scientific research, but do you need to kill almost 1000 animals to satisfy these research needs (or some 8000 animals since the JARPA programme was established)? Combined, other nations have killed approximately 2,100 whales for scientific research since 1952. Perhaps a more likely explanation for the increase in numbers is to use ‘science’ to advance a political agenda, namely using ex-commercial whaling vessels and equipment to kill whales to sell commercially and thus create a financial incentive to kill more whales. This mis-use of science does little to instil confidence in science or policy in the general public.

I do not agree that as a consequence of the anti-whaling campaign we have come to “venerate cetaceans”. It is my opinion, and that of others, that the oceanarium industry of the 60’s and 70’s brought about the ‘touchy-feely’ association with cetaceans. The ability to capture, house and train Orcas turned the public’s perception around enormously, along with the scientific work that was also being produced at the time on dolphin cognition and large whale acoustics (such as humpback whale song). The concern about anti-whaling likely arose from media images and a heightened awareness of the cognitive abilities and social lives of this group of animals. When I was a child, people would carve their initials in stranded cetaceans and put cigarette butts down their blowholes. There has been a massive change in opinion from fearing whales when you are in a boat to making money out of them. To suggest that Greenpeace is responsible for our change of heart towards whales is unreasonable, and to be totally honest, in Australia it was Project Jonah who led the protests in 1977 to close the Cheynnes Beach whaling station, not Greenpeace.

This forum appears to be very much ‘anti-green’, and you have already expressed “It is already well-known I have little sympathy for Greenpeace”. In an effort to try and discredit this organization, I am concerned that you yourself are not presenting the truth at times.

Are you suggesting that because we apparently “venerate cetaceans” we are biased when national and international environmental policies for the conservation of the species are developed? There is no question that cetaceans receive more positive press than stick insects. Sadly, it is human nature that makes us favour certain Orders over others. However, to claim that we are so awe-struck by these ‘mystical beings’ that scientists and policy makers can’t make unbiased and sensible decisions is plain insulting, as well as very silly.

I do agree with your comments on the need to better regulate the dugong hunting in Australian waters. Along with hunting, the species faces entanglement, boat strikes, habitat destruction, diminishing food resources and pollution. However, this is another issue altogether, and perhaps one you can make a positive contribution towards in your forum separately.

You say you support the right of indigenous communities and the Japanese and Norwegians to kill marine mammals as long as it is sustainable. Estimates of cetacean populations in the Antarctic and elsewhere vary widely, depending on who is doing the research, the techniques involved, the season and year surveys are conducted in, changes in possible ‘site fidelity’, the validity of old data such as whaling records, and the influence of factors such as predator-prey relationships and environmental dynamics. There are estimates from 1989 of 760, 000 minkes in the Antarctic (not considering stock/genetic identity), although the IWC no longer considers this number to be valid. In reality the figure could be as low as 300,000 (not considering stock/genetic identity). The numbers of minkes killed has increased for both the Japanese scientific kill and the Norwegian commercial hunt. Should commercial whaling resume by Japan and other countries, it is sensible to believe that the numbers will be significantly higher. Is it realistic to assume that the whale populations will remain at current levels (whatever they may be), and not be negatively impacted upon by other events such as global warming? The polar regions are particularly susceptible to climate change, and changes in sea surface temperature, sea ice coverage and ocean circulation are almost certain to change phytoplankton communities and all that depend on them.

The ability to honestly report numbers and species that are being killed is something that many are rightly sceptical about. We now know that the Soviets were conducting illegal whaling in a number of areas (most notably the Antarctic), after the protection of highly endangered species such as right and blue whales. Japanese researchers have also reported that sperm whale catches were under-reported in Japanese land-based whaling operations. The knowledge of the illegal Soviet catches makes it easier to understand why populations of humpbacks in the Fiji/Tonga breeding assemblages are not showing the same rates of recovery as the East and West Australia humpbacks. These populations are the ones the Japanese intend to start taking for their research under JARPA II. The taking of protected species such as humpback, fin and sei (the North Pacific JARPN II lethal research programme) whales, which are also highly migratory, demonstrates that this one nation has very little ‘respect’ for the conservation concerns and transient fauna of other nations.

Cetaceans, and in particular the large species such as the baleen whales, do not reproduce annually. They have low recruitment rates and take many years to reach sexual maturity. There is no way of telling the sex of a whale when you are standing behind the harpoon, and therefore you may be biasing the population by taking out mostly mature males or even pregnant females. One argument that is often used is that we eat (for example) cows. Cows are regular reproducers, and cows can be counted and adequately managed when they are in a paddock, even the size of one in the Top End. There is so much debate about population estimates of cetaceans that I am surprised you have not mentioned how hard it is to get accurate figures of whale stocks, be they in the Antarctic or North Atlantic. Cetaceans by their very nature are very hard to study as they spend so much time out of sight and inhabiting areas that are expensive and often difficult to survey properly. Migratory species like fin whales, although being the second largest animal on Earth, are largely unknown as a species. No one knows where the southern stocks of this endangered species winters and breeds, let alone what their numbers are. Counting the animals at sea is extremely difficult. Killing animals that we know very little about in order to gain further knowledge is irresponsible when there are non-lethal techniques available.

Of course whaling is not the only threat that whales now face. A female humpback whale will reproduce every 2-3 years. But her calf has a high risk of mortality in its first year due to a variety of factors such as predation, entanglement (maybe in Queensland shark nets), illness, its mother being compromised and so on. We know that low frequency sonar such as is used in naval exercises can cause mortality, that there is an increase in the numbers of cetaceans struck by ships (the northern right whale is highly endangered due to vessel strikes), that some 300,000 cetaceans die from entanglement in man-made fishing devices annually, and that scores are killed in pollution-triggered die-offs. That information is out there, and the numbers are often under reported. It is not a simple exercise of saying that whaling will have no impact on cetacean numbers when there are so many other factors at play as well.

You have argued that the Norwegians have a “reasoned and scientific approach” that we could “learn from”. One of their main arguments for hunting marine mammals is that they believe they are in direct competition for food resources. As far as I am aware, there is no reliable scientific evidence to support this. The dynamics of ecosystems and predator-prey relationships cannot be answered by simply taking out a single species of predator, such as minke or sei whales. Industrialised fishing is responsible for changes in composition and abundance of fish stocks. The commercial push for the resumption of commercial whaling is no different to fisheries, and fisheries statistics shows that many populations are already beyond their sustainable levels. In light of your “sympathetic” view on whaling, I see your support of Norway’s “reasoned and scientific approach” far from impartial.

Personally, my aversion to whaling is not “cultural”. It is based on the fact that there is no scientific, social or historical evidence to show me it is sustainable, in addition to it being inhumane, and unnecessary. I think you are underestimating the Australian public and most cetacean researchers, and putting your own opinions in a forum that you maintain is to be balanced, but is highly biased and also poorly researched and understood.

Libby Eyre

Why Isn’t the Antarctic Warming as Much as the Arctic?

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I was really impressed by this picture when I first saw it. It is from the NASA website and shows the extent of warming in the Arctic relative to the rest of the globe.

2005_surfacetemp_anomaly.gif

An American newspaper included comment that:

A University of Alabama scientist says global warming is not nearly as global as some people think. …Temperatures in 2005 followed a general pattern seen since 1978, with the most significant warming seen in the northernmost third of the planet. Large regions of slightly warmer than normal temperatures covered much of the globe.
The Arctic atmosphere, however, has warmed more than seven times faster than that over the southern two-thirds of the globe.

And there was comment at Tim Blair’s popular blog along the lines:

The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is distributed pretty evenly around the globe and not concentrated in the Arctic, so it doesn’t look like we can blame greenhouse gases for the overwhelming bulk of the Northern Hemisphere warming over the past 27 years

Vincent Gray has written that:

The models predict increased warming, equally, at both the North and South Poles. The measurements show that the two poles are completely different. The North Pole is warming the South Pole is cooling.

The models predict much greater warming than is observed, and the only way they can get out of it is to assume a large cooling influence of clouds and aerosols, Since these are concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, there should be greater net warming in the South than in the North. The observations show the opposite.

But, according to Cecilia Bitz writing for Real Climate the models can, and do, account for lots of warming at the Arctic and not much at the Antarctic:

Manabe and Stouffer (1980) first popularized the phrase “polar amplification” to describe the amplified rate of surface warming at the poles compared to the rest of the globe in their climate model’s response to increasing greenhouse gas levels.

Their early climate model had a simple ocean component that only represented the mixed layer of the water. Their model had roughly symmetric poleward amplification in the two hemispheres, except over the Antarctic continent, where they argued the ice is too thick and cold to melt back.

…Observed polar climate change from the instrumental record is not symmetric. Except along the Antarctic Peninsula , most evidence of significant warming is from the Arctic. In addition, total sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean has had no significant trend since satellites began taking data in 1979 (Cavalieri et al 2003). Newer climate models generally also have very modest or no polar amplification over the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in hindcasts of the last century. The presence of a deep and circulating ocean component is key because ocean heat uptake increases most in the Southern Ocean as the climate warms (see Gregory 2000). The asymmetry at the poles does not however result from a difference in feedback strength associated with the ice or atmosphere. In fact, when these same climate models are run to equilibrium (in the same way that Manabe and Stouffer ran their model so that ocean heat uptake is not a factor) the hemispheres have nearly equal polar amplification.

David Jones at the Australian Bureau of Meterology explains:

The failure of the Antarctic to warm is pretty well understood. It is linked to the marked strengthening which has occurred in the southern annular mode. The “southern annular mode” is a fancy name for the strength of the Antarctic low pressure trough and westerly winds (the roaring forties, furious fifties, screaming sixties).

… Over the last 30 years we have seen a very marked intensification of the trough – most of this happened in a short period of time from around 1970 to 1990. This is believed to be due to the loss of ozone in the polar stratosphere which caused a very strong cooling of the stratosphere and upper troposphere over the Antarctic. This cooling lead to a strong increase in the temperature gradient between the equator and poles, which through the dynamics must strengthen the westerly winds (this is summarised in a fairly basic dynamical equation called the “thermal wind” relationship).

The strengthened westerlies has a number of effects. These include enhanced warming on the northern side of the trough (the trough typically being near 65S). This explains the spectacular warming over the Antarctic Peninsula (which is occurring much faster than one might expect from the simple greenhouse effect). On the southern side, the reverse happens; i.e. cooling.

For the last 20 years of so, this cooling has been sufficient to offset the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is a great example of the thermodynamics (temperature changes) and dynamics (winds etc) operating in different directions. Another effect of the stronger westerlies is that the increase the equatorwards drift of sea ice (through a process called Ekman drift) which probably explains why sea ice in the southern hemisphere appears to have retreated extensively from around 1900 to 1970 and stabilised and infact expanded subsequently.

There is a real cautionary tale here about non-linearities in climate change.

There is, in my view, also a real cautionary tale in the new paper by Keppler et al. in science journal Nature as summarized in the Editorial:

The unexpectedly high levels of the green-house gas methane over tropical forests, and the recent decline in the atmospheric growth rate of methane concentrations, cannot be readily explained with the accepted global methane budget. Now a genuinely surprising discovery provides a possible explanation for these phenomena, and may have implications for modelling past and future climates. It was thought that methane formed naturally only in anaerobic conditions, in marshes for instance. In fact living plants, as well as plant litter, emit methane to the atmosphere under oxic conditions. This additional source of methane could account for 10-30 percent of the annual methane source strength and has been overlooked in previous studies.

Vincent Gray has remarked with respect to this new finding that:

The answer to the fact that climate models cannot simulate actual global temperature change may be due to a fact I have been emphasizing for many years. The models all assume that greenhouse gases are “well-mixed”, however, they are not “well-mixed”, so that temperatures cannot be adequately calculated by using average greenhouse gas concentrations. You should use actual concentrations over the particular region.

… Of course, average methane concentrations in the atmosphere have apparently stabilised, so this present scare does not add any extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It does cast into serious doubt current models supposedly relating emissions of methane to atmospheric concentrations, though.

This discovery will certainly change attitudes to “climate change”, for it now appears that in order to reduce “global warming” you should not only cut carbon dioxide emissions, but you should also cut down forests, reduce agriculture, drain wetlands and cover the world with concrete.

Rather than “cover the world with concrete” as concrete is also a source of greenhouse gases, there is perhaps reason at this time in our history for both global warming skeptics and global warming believers to be a bit humble. There is so much we just don’t understand.

But someone, tell me how important is it really, as Vincent suggests, that we “use actual concentrations over the particular region”?