Archives for March 20, 2007

Earlier this year I spent a week at the beach, more specifically at Bluey’s Beach, on the NSW mid-north coast. My daughter and partner are both keen surfers. So, always in search of that best wave break, we also visited Boomerang, Elizabeth, Seal Rocks and a few other beaches.

I’m used to southeast Queensland with the summer water temperature a very pleasant 26C or so, and expected the same in NSW.

But the first day we went surfing it was a very cold 14C!

So much for the global warming of sea temperatures I thought as I shivered on the beach that day.

The locals explained that it was unusual, but they didn’t seem to have a good explanation. Interestingly, the water wasn’t so cold every day or at every beach.

According to a recent article in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph a “massive, mysterious whirlpool of cold water” formed off Sydney in January and is still active “forcing the sea surface to fall almost 1m and ocean currents to change course”.

So sea levels are falling off Sydney?

According to the CSIRO, oceanographers have identified a huge, dense mass of cold water off Sydney but know very little about what causes it.

“What we do know is that this is a very powerful natural feature which tends to push everything else aside – even the mighty East Australian Current,” says CSIRO’s Dr David Griffin.

Dr Griffin, from the Wealth from Oceans Flagship Research program, said cold-water eddies regularly appear off Sydney.

“Until 20 years ago we would not have known they even existed without accidentally steaming through them on a research vessel,” he said.

“However, now that we can routinely identify them from space via satellite, marine scientists can evaluate their role as a source of life in the marine ecosystem.”

Reaching to a depth of more than 1000m, the 200km diameter ocean eddy has a rotational period of about seven days. Its centre is about 100km directly offshore from Sydney.” [end of quote]

Now I’m waiting for a best AGW explanation for this dramatic, even if localized and ephemeral, drop in sea level and sea temperature.

While various commentators have suggested that the debate is over, that anthropogenic global warming is a reality and the deniers should be silenced, if not jailed, last week there was a high profile debate on the motion “Global Warming is not a Crisis” in New York.**

The proposition, Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott, won by 46% to 42%. Before the event the organizers found the motion would have been disapproved of 57% to 30%, indicating a swing in favour of the global warming skeptics.

This morning I received an email requesting I post the details of a second possible debate, this time between The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Vice-President Albert Gore on the subject “That our effect on climate is not dangerous” to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President’s choosing.

Ewire.com is advertising the debate with comment that:

“Monckton a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said, “A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide.”

Monckton and Gore have once before clashed head to head on the science, politics, and religion of global warming in the usually-decorous pages of the London Sunday Telegraph last November.

Monckton calls on the former Vice President to “step up to the plate and defend his advocacy of policies that could do grave harm to the welfare of the world’s poor. If Mr. Gore really believes global warming is the defining issue of our time, the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, and then he should welcome the opportunity to raise the profile of the issue before a worldwide audience of billions by defining and defending his claims against a serious, science-based challenge”. [end of quote]

My guess is that Al Gore will decline the invitation. He has so far been reluctant to debate, declining the opportunity to go head-to-head with the skeptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, when he visited Denmark last year.

Monckton ended his invitation with “May the truth win! Magna est veritas, et praevalent“.

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** You can read a 79 page transcript of the New York debate at http://www.crichton-official.com/GlobalWarmingDebate.pdf