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’
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.
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.
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’
It was hilarious seeing Kevin Rudd give a press conference on renewable energy at a Townsville school on Tuesday, when the wind and solar batteries failed and plunged the room into darkness. The media questioning continued, but under the thin light of the battery-operated TV cameras.
Rudd had the wit to laugh about the mishap but it is an omen of things to come if climate-change hysteria continues and the desire to drastically slash carbon emissions overrides reality.
The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Dead treaty, but Labor’s flogging it’
October, 2007 RESEARCH UPDATE: We have submitted a research paper to the Journal of Climate in which we used a simple climate model to demonstrate how natural climate variability in temperature and clouds can be mis-diagnosed as positive feedback (cloud changes with warming that are presumed to amplify the warming, an effect which is programmed into all leading computerized climate models). The misdiagnosis occurs because climate researchers look at cloud variability as a RESULT of temperature variability, when in fact some of the temperature variability is actually caused by the clouds. We also constrained the model with satellite observations in order to estimate the likely magnitude of this positive feedback bias.
August, 2007 RESEARCH UPDATE: Our peer-reviewed paper showing the natural cooling behavior of tropical cirrus clouds in response to warming was published on August 9 in Geophysical Research Letters. (The UAH news release is here.) In that paper we describe satellite evidence for a natural cooling mechanism (‘negative feedback’)that occurs when the tropical atmosphere heats up. This is in contrast to all leading climate models, which have cirrus clouds behaving as a positive feedback, amplifying warming tendencies. [In an unusual turn of events, absolutely no reporters contacted me about these important results. It will be interesting to see whether any climate modelers include this effect in their climate models — a change which would likely greatly reduce the amount of global warming those models predict for the future.]
Introduction
Here I present a simplified (but hopefully accurate) explanation of the basics of global warming – call it a global warming primer. First, I will address the issue of how warm we are today, and some possible explanations for that warmth. Next, I’ll briefly describe the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect and global warming theory. Finally, I will explain the “thermostatic control” mechanism that I believe stabilizes the climate system against substantial global warming from mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions. Some of what I will present is an extension of Richard Lindzen’s “infrared iris” effect, support for which was published on August 9, 2007 (see August Research Update, above).
The bottom line is this: Precipitation systems ultimately control the magnitude of the Earth’s total greenhouse effect –which is mostly due to water vapor and clouds — and those systems change in ways that offset the small warming tendency from mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the entire article ‘Global Warming and Nature’s Thermostat:Precipitation Systems’ by Roy W. Spencer
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.
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