Archives for August 2006

Clive Hamilton, Executive Director of The Australian Institute, has written a rather pointed piece for today’s Sydney Morning Herald suggesting that Tim Flannery, author of a recent book on global warming, is “a trump card” in Prime Minister John Howard’s “nuclear power play”. It also suggests that the government has bought off environment group the WWF:

“WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) is the foremost of the friendly organisations. It is close to the Government, providing a stream of favourable commentary on its policies and bestowing several awards for the Government’s environmental achievements, including three “Gift to the Earth” awards, which the Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, displays in his office. In return, the Government has been generous, sending tens of millions to the fund for various programs.

The force behind the emergence of the organisation as the leading group backing the Government’s environment policy is the businessman Robert Purves. He has made a very large donation to WWF and is now its president.

Purves has drawn Tim Flannery into the orbit of conservative environmentalism by funding the preparation of Flannery’s book on climate change, The Weather Makers. … Purves is said to have spent $1 million promoting Flannery’s book, including costly backlit billboards outside Qantas Club lounges around the country.”

This is not the first time Clive Hamilton has thrown mud at WWF, his first shot was perhaps publication of a report titled ‘Taming The Panda’ just a couple of years ago.

Queensland’s Premier, Peter Beattie, has been telling the 2 million or so people who live in the south east of Queensland that “we have a water crisis and the worst drought on record”.

We are dependent on three dams to the north-west of the city of Brisbane and it has not rained in that catchment for some time. But is it the worst drought on record?

Most reporters have just been repeating the Premier’s claims that it is the worst drought on record; which in Australia only takes us back a hundred or so years.

But this morning there was a piece in local paper the Courier Mail explaining that: “a computer simulation showed if the Wivenhoe and Somerset dams had been built earlier this century they would have been empty during the federation drought and close to current levels in the 1940s. …hit low levels in the 1920s, late 1980s and late 1990s.”

William Kinnimonth in a piece for the IPA titled ‘Predictions of Drought Lack Credibility’ writing last June, in a whole of Australia context, identified the following drought years:

1885-1902 (the federation drought)
1914-15*
1937-45
1965-68
1982-83*
1991-95.

Kinnimonth links all of these droughts to either major El Nino events (1914-15 & 192-83) or to years when their was “El Nino-like sea surface temperature patterns across the equatorial Pacific Ocean” (those years not marked with an asterisk).

There is much speculation that the Premier will announce an early election for perhaps 9th September and make water a feature of his re-election campaign. This is perhaps a risky strategy as he is perhaps responsible for the ‘water crisis’ in so much as his government has invested very little in water infrastructure over the years. Alternativley he could hope it storms over summer? He doesn’t have to hold an election until February.

Is it likely to rain this summer potentially taking the pressure off south east Queensland water supplies?

My reading of the following advice from the Bureau of Meteorology is ‘perhaps’:

“The overall ENSO status remains neutral. Generally weak trends have been observed in the main Pacific climate indicators during the past few weeks, and the potential for an El Niño event to develop this year is still relatively low. … The main concern remains the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), which is still hovering around the −10 mark, indicating a general weakness in the Pacific Walker Circulation. In addition, the Trade Winds have been weaker than average across much of the Pacific during July, so this situation will be monitored closely for any sustained trends. However, with the exception of the far eastern Pacific, ocean temperatures are only marginally above average, both on and below the surface. Therefore, there is only a slight risk that the Pacific will warm to levels high enough for an El Niño event to develop.”

Given the importance of ocean temperatures as a driver of weather and climate it is interesting that climatologists don’t have a better understanding of how it all works. There is an interesting article titled ‘El Niño and Global Warming’ at www.realclimate.org exploring some of these issues.

But tell me, will it rain this summer in south east Queensland?

I was sent the following note from Walter Starck:

“The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) debate is not about a paradigm shift or even about a basic theory. No one is arguing that CO2 does not absorb IR or that burning fossil fuel does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. In essence the AGW debate is about whether increasing CO2 by a few hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere will have catastrophic consequences on global climate. AGW proponents claim scientific certainty that it will and cite as proof a 0.6 degree C increase in average global temperature over the past century, a putative increase in extreme weather events and predictions of ongoing future warming based on computer models of global climate. Skeptics find significant uncertainty in the amount, causes and consequences of any warming and in the accuracy of the models. They point to major doubts regarding the amount and cause of recent warming, past extremes that equal or exceed recent ones, benefits of CO2 enrichment plus numerous simplifications, guesses and omissions in the models as well as wide discrepancies between them.

No amount or strength of argument seems likely to resolve this debate before reality irrefutably intrudes. Barring a major global recession anthropogenic CO2 emissions will continue to increase for at least the next few decades and the truth or fantasy of AGW will become increasingly apparent.

On the skeptic side a good case has been put forward for an important role in solar variability on climate via an effect on cloud cover. This theory fits well with past climatic fluctuations and most importantly, it predicts future ones. Of these, the most significant is the Landscheidt Minimum around 2030 which should be comparable to the LIA.

Whether anthropogenic CO2 is forcing global climate toward catastrophic warming or solar cycles are the dominant control should become strongly indicative in the next decade and near conclusive over the following one. For skeptics to win this debate by superior evidence and argumentation would probably take longer than letting reality settle it. The more important role for skeptics is to provide an opposing balance against hysteria and to define what is to be learned from the whole affair. This is unlikely to come from true believers no matter what the actual outcome.

AGW proponents on the whole seem to be afflicted with a desire for certainty and intolerance of any suggestion of doubt while skeptics seem more concerned about dogmatism and false claims of certainty than they are of the possible reality of AGW. This difference in perspective reflects a fundamental divergence in the very essence of the scientific enterprise. Is it primarily a belief , a sphere of activity and a career or is it a particular philosophical approach to understanding based on empirical evidence, logical consistency and verifiability? Is the higher aim to provide authority for belief or to keep it open to question and better understanding? Is there a deficiency in scientific training that produces highly trained technicians but not the doctors of philosophy their degrees proclaim?

Also inherent in this divergence of perspective is the attitude to risk. Is it something to avoided at all costs (as enshrined in the precautionary principle) or something to be accepted or rejected on the basis of evaluation?

In the case of AGW it increasingly seems that such underlying issues may well be more important than the actual debate itself.

Walter Starck“