A vast rubbish dump, which covers an area bigger than Australia, is floating in the Pacific Ocean and research shows it is growing bigger.
The rubbish collects in one area because of a clockwise trade wind that circulates around the Pacific rim.
Archives for November 2, 2007
La Nina Fails to Deliver
It’s normally associated with copious rainfall, but this time around, La Nina has failed to deliver.
While the east coast of Australia has received some rain over the last few months, inland Australia has missed out.
It’s a very unusual event, and one that some scientists say has not occurred for many decades.
ABC News: ‘Farmland misses out on La Nina rains’
How Much Warming from Fireworks? A Question from Trevor Devine
Dear Jennifer,
I have been wondering what thoughts you may have on the NSW state governments stance on global warming and their seemingly contradictory actions of tying 2 or 3 million dollars of fireworks to the Sydney Harbour Bridge each New Year and Australia Day and letting it rip oblivious on at least these two days of their claimed effects on global warming.
Kind Regards,
Trevor Devine
Councillor
Hawkesbury City Council.
Northern Leaf-tailed Geckos
Driving to Cape Tribulation two nights ago, I was hit with the unmistakable stench of what the Guugu Yimithirr indigenous people (just up the coast) call yumu; a scummy residue of coral spawning in the shallows of the coral sea. On this same night, I located two Northern Leaf-tailed Geckos on the sides of nearby trees, at the same height off the ground and on the same side, most proximal to the direction of the onshore winds. I wondered if these two events were related.
It took me eight years of almost nightly searching to find my first Northern Leaf-tailed Gecko Saltuarius cornutus. Endemic to the rainforests of the Wet Tropics and almost invisible in their marbled discretion, they are Australia’s largest gecko.
The attached image shows the difference between the original tail (left) and the regenerated tail (middle). The camouflaged, lidless eye (right) shows a slit pupil which allows much more light when fully dilated and the very reflective tapetum requires that the gecko face downward to avoid detection from owls. In the event of an attack, the tail and hind legs and the inverted position increase the likelihood that the kill-shot will be directed at the strategically deceptive ‘recoverable’ end.
In relation to sea-borne scum, I was impressed by the size of a vast rubbish dump floating in the Pacific Ocean, which covers an area bigger than Australia, as reported in ABC News.
2007 Nobel Peace Prize Winner No. 2498 – John Christy
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)
My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”
The above are extracts from The Wall Street Journal article ‘My Nobel Moment’
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.