Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for March 2007

The Debating Has Really Only Just Begun Over Global Warming

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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

Warm Start to This Year

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The global December 2006 to February 2007 land surface temperature was the warmest on record according to NOAA.

But Melbourne’s The Age newspaper was wrong to suggest this means the planet is “hotter than ever”!

There is some dispute as to whether the planet was warmer than it is now during the medieval warm period (from about the 9th to 14th Century when Greenland was colonised by the Vikings). But I think it is generally agreed that the earth was warmer during the last interglacial warm period which was about 125,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, the warm start to this year does not bode well for the two Russian climate change skeptics who have bet US$10,000 that the earth is going to cool soon. But this year (2007) won’t count. Their bet depends on the period 2012 to 2017 being warmer than the period 1998 to 2003.

temp anomaly dec06-feb07.JPG
Map from NOAA via Luke, added as an update to this blog post on 19th March 2007

More on Australia’s Water Crisis and Climate Change, This Sunday on ‘Sunday’

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I really wanted to walk out of the channel 9 television studio in Sydney last Thursday.

I was there because the ‘Sunday’ program had flown me all the way from Brisbane to be a part of a ‘water forum’ to discuss ‘the water crisis’.

Also there, on the very large forum panel, was federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, Wentworth Group Member and Water Commission Commissioner, Professor Peter Cullen, Australian Conservation Foundation Executive Director, Don Henry and the list went on to also include Laurie Arthur from the Rice Growers Association and someone from the Bureau of Meteorology and of course there was Dr Mike Young from CSIRO and a few more.

I almost forgot. They also had Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, on a video link up from Brisbane.

Before I could get a word in edge ways, Premier Beattie and Professor Cullen with some help from Minister Turnbull and others, had spun the usual story including that due to climate change, the Murray Darling Basin, not to mention the rest of Australia is in the grip of a water crisis.

I don’t dispute that there is a water crisis, but I do dispute that it has much to do with climate change.

Minister Turnbull had also falsely claimed that Australian irrigators are inefficient and need reforming and Don Henry had managed to explain that the Murray River is in ruin. Mr Henry has been making the same claim over and over for about 10 years.

I had naïvely thought it wouldn’t unravel as such.

It was, after all, only last year that ‘Sunday’ ran a feature story on the Murray River explaining that there was no environmental crisis and no salinity crisis. One of their film crews had traveled the length of the river with Ross Coulthart uncovering the extent of the ‘honesty crisis’ – as I described it at the time.

Just a few weeks ago, in advance of the water forum, I had sent more information through to channel 9 explaining that despite all the more recent hype, the river is still doing OK. I also sent them through Bureau of Meteorology graphs, including a graph showing that there has not been a gradual long-term decline in rainfall in the Murray Darling Basin, as is so often repeatedly and falsely suggested in the mainstream media.

rainfall06_bom_summary 2.JPG

But this time most of the evidence was just ignored.

The shows host, Ellen Fanning, let Professor Cullen and others repeatedly confuse inflows with rainfall, drought with climate change and suggest the new $10 billion National Plan for Water Security could solve “the water crisis”.

While Ellen was in complete control of where the cameras were pointing when, I did manage to make a few points in response to Premier Beattie’s claim that southeast Queensland’s water crisis was the fault of climate change and wait for it, local government, and I also managed to correct Professor Cullen when he suggested there was a direct link between the 30 percent increase in global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the current water crisis.

They filmed for 90 minutes and will edit this down to just 30 minutes. So, my efforts may have all been in vain.

There is ample opportunity, thanks in particular to Professor Cullen and Minister Turnbull, for the program to really hone the doomsayers message that we have a ‘climate crisis’ and that the government’s $10 billion plan can really fix it.

But I’m hopeful, if not optimistic, they might find a spot for some balance.

Anyway, the ‘water forum’ on the ‘water crisis’ should screen this Sunday on ‘Sunday’ some time between 9 and 11 am.

New Website, New Blog, New Photographs: A Note from Neil Hewett

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Hi Jen,

After a torrid month or so of blundering around a web-design application and with the help of the team at Wild Lime Media, we have finally published (and hopefully de-bugged) our new website; complete with a ‘Rainforest Revelations’ weblog.

Now that that’s done, I can return to some semblance of a life. In my absence from your blog, I have captured some interesting images.

The Daintree Cape Tribulation rainforest is at its most vibrant in the wet. Some of its best-kept secrets are revealed in circumstances that are frustratingly uninviting to visitors. Nevertheless, we at Cooper Creek Wilderness carry on with our tours and share the wonder of the wet with a privileged few.

This image of a brush-footed trapdoor spider was captured two nights ago at the entrance to its burrow, deep within the buttress roots of a Javan Ash.

Brush-footed Trapdoo#260290 blog.JPG

Primitive spiders lack trachea and have very limited respiratory capabilities. Their gill-like book-lungs confer a greater proximity to an aqueous pre-existence, than the more modern and mobile Araneomorphs. They are also less able to travel great distances from the protection of their burrows and tend to have more immobilizing venom.

Also known as whistling spiders, barking spiders or Australia’s Tarantulas, they are subject to concerning pressures from collectors who sell them as pets for around $400 each. In an attempt to control these impacts, their trade has become regulated by licencing requirements (I wonder if this is having any success).

The other interesting image is a magnification of a longicorn beetle’s head, Batocera sp., whose family includes Australia’s largest beetle.

Longicorn blog.JPG

Their powerful mandibles rip into timber and their large, white and fleshy larvae are favoured bush-tucker for Cape York bama.

All the best from Cooper Creek Wilderness,

Neil Hewett.

Rising Sea Levels or Just Sinking Islands: A Note from Ian Mott

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Hello Jen,

Our national broadcaster, the ABC, has struck again with a new low in responsible journalism.

In ‘PNG – That Sinking Feeling’, broadcast last night as part of the ‘Foreign Correspondent’ program, reporter Steve Marshall has trashed any credibility the ABC had left on environmental reporting.

The unambiguous message in the documentary and all the introductory material was that here was firm “evidence” of rising sea levels producing climate refugees.

The most powerful scene was of one islander and the reporter standing waist deep in water where the islanders father had once had his veggie patch. The implication being that sea levels had risen by close to two metres over recent decades.

The only problem with this is that the Carteret Islands are only a short distance from Bougainville where no such sea level rise has been reported. Moreover, the area is only 500km from some very serious recent volcanic activity at Rabaul and form part of an active volcanic chain through the Solomon Islands.

The Islanders appear to have been convinced that they are the victims of rising sea levels and global warming, no doubt from a procession of publicly funded planet ponces.

But if Marshall and the program managers at ‘Foreign Correspondent’ had been able to deal with more than one variable at a time they would have drawn the inescapable conclusion that the islands are sinking.

Instead they appear to have manufactured a piece of green propaganda that neatly dovetails with Al Gore’s thoroughly discredited claim that Pacific Islanders are already being displaced by rising sea levels?

What I find most offensive is the way a group of islanders who are confronted by a serious problem appear to have been exploited.

If the ABC can get something this simple completely wrong, then what does that tell us about the veracity of their reporting on much more complex issues elsewhere?

Regards,
Ian Mott

Eco-Freaks: A New Book by John Berlau (Part 1, DDT)

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I occasionally get emails from the other side of the world with a query about something environmental that is uniquely Australian.

It was not so many years ago that John Berlau emailed me about the Murray River and also bushfires. He was writing a book. It’s now published. Called ‘Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism is Hazardous to Your Health’ the book includes chapters on DDT, Asbestos and Hurricane Katrina.

I’ve only read the first three chapters. There could be something in the following few about the Murray River and Australia or he may be saving that for another book.

Anyway, while the focus in ‘Eco-Freaks’ is on America, the issues Berlau chooses to explore are relevant to the whole world.

The second chapter on DDT, and entitled ‘Rachel Carson Kills Birds’, will have Tim Lambert in a spin. In fact Berlau references Lambert’s blog ‘Deltoid’ (footnote number 128). But it’s not complementary.

I have read a lot about DDT, Rachel Carson and environmentalism, but I still learnt a lot from that chapter.

And I was amused by the anecdotal. In particular, that Joseph Jacobs, a chemist who worked to mass-produce DDT to protect American troops during World War II, ended up with DDT poured over him when the valve at the bottom of a large vessel was accidentally opened. In his autobiography, Jacobs wrote:

“When it dried, I had DDT an inch thick all over me. In my hair, in my ears, and in my mouth and nose. I took off my clothes, showered, and scrubbed, but probably ingested more DDT during that one incident than is today considered safe to absorb over any years.”

Berlau goes on to comment about the fate of Joseph Jacobs:

“After all, in the years after Silent Spring, DDT was called ‘double death twice’. One touch could kill you. And sadly, after being exposed, Jacobs did die – more than sixty years later in 2004, at the tender young age of eighty-eight.”

‘Eco-Freaks’ is available from Amazons.com.