Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for December 28, 2007

Newmont Wins Civil Suit in Jakarta, Rick Ness Retires

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The mining thread at this blog has been dominated by the Buyat Bay saga; the alleged deliberate pollution of the bay, fishing village and its fringing coral reef in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, by US mining giant Newmont and in particular its Indonesian boss Richard Ness.

I attended the verdict in the criminal trial of Mr Ness earlier this year. He was acquitted of all charges.

National environment group WALHI brought a civil suit against Newmont about a month before that verdict was due to be handed down. On Tuesday December 18, 2007 the South Jakarta District Court of Indonesia cleared Newmont of any environmental wrongdoing at Buyat Bay, dismissing the civil suit. A spokesperson for Newmont commented that, “We hope this second exoneration by yet another Indonesian court will put to rest – once and for all – the hoax that Buyat Bay is polluted.”

An opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal included comment that, “Accusations against business folks these days get a lot more publicity than acquittals do, so we thought we’d let you know about a victory for a U.S. mining company facing bogus charges that it was responsible for killing poor villagers in Indonesia. The case was promoted by environmentalists and hyped with a 2,600-word page-one article in the New York Times in 2004.”

The same week Newmont was cleared in Jakarta, Rick Ness announced his retirement. My best wishes to Rick and Nova for life after Newmont.

You can read more about the Buyat Bay Saga at his son Eric’s website: http://www.richardness.org.

Monaro Farmer Seeks Compensation for Carbon Sink

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In the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney on Thursday 20th December 2007, the Court rejected the Commonwealth’s application to strike out a Statement of Claim entered into the Court by Monaro District farmer Mr Peter Spencer.

Mr Spencer has claimed that Intergovernmental Agreements between the Commonwealth and the States and Territories, along with the International Treaty the Kyoto Protocol that was signed in April 1998 that set Greenhouse Emissions Targets that Australia have to meet by 2012, bind both the Commonwealth and State together.

The Carbon Sink developed on his property by the State banning Land Clearing has expropriated Mr Spencers property and prohibited the lawful use of his land for Agricultural purpose and no payments for sequestration and storing Carbon has been negotiated, this acquisition was not on “Just Terms” as the Commonwealth Constitution provides for just compensation for the acquisition of property.

Counsel representing Mr Spencer in proceedings, Mr Peter E King said after the hearing, “This is the first occasion in Australia’s legal history that it has been found there was an “arguable case” against the Commonwealth on behalf of farming interests that the Kyoto Protocol may give rise to Property Rights”.

Mr Spencer said “I am delighted that my case will be heard and it vindicates my beliefs, farmers have as much right as coal – miners to recognition under the Climate Change Convention”.

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** This is the text of a media release from The Commonwealth Property Protection Association made on the 21 December 2007.

Privet Hawk Moth

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PrivetHawkMoth.jpg

Not all is bad! We can rejoice in the grandeur of nature … in a multitude of expressions.

The Privet Hawk Moth, for example,

PrivetHawkCaterpillar.jpg

blends magnificently with its environment.

Happy New Year to you all. Hope to see you in the ancient rainforests of the Daintree, or in the not too distant future, at www.ccwild.com/wiki

Your’s,

Neil

More Broken Panes in the Greenhouse

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Apologies for my lack of blogging activity of late – I’ve had a busy Christmas period on both the work and home fronts. Some friends even managed to hold a pre-Chrsitmas BBQ on 22nd December – no, not a result of global warming in the UK, just a cool, pleasant evening and the heat from the BBQ itself.

Despite science historian Naomi Oreskes’s claim, repeated ad nauseum by greenhouse industry beneficiaries that there are few or no peer reviewed papers that dispute the still undefined ‘consensus’ on anthropogenic global climate change, such papers have not been hard to find during 2007. Some of the more recent papers containing inconvenient results, that I haven’t previously blogged, are briefly described below:

Surface:troposphere warming

According to climate models of enhanced greenhouse warming, the tropical troposphere should warm more than the surface. Recent publications have contradictory results despite using essentially the same data. The latest paper on this subject, by Douglass et al, suggests that model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere.

Interestingly, a poster presented by Penner and Andronova at the recent AGU meeting, entitled ‘Tropical atmosphere radiative budget 1985-2005’ seems to reconcile the differences between surface and troposheric warming, supporting the Douglass et al data, without necessarily disproving enhanced greenhouse warming.

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit attended the conference and the following is extracted from his write-up:

“the tropical atmosphere has absorbed less energy and the Earth’s surface has gained energy which is consistent with the temperature increase in the tropics;

the tropical atmosphere has recently become less reflective and more absorbing while the Earth’s surface gained radiative energy; thus, the tropical atmosphere had recently become more transparent to the incoming radiation and there is an overall brightening of the Earth’s system;

none of the IPCC AR4 models simulates the overall brightening of the Earth system. The majority of the models show a loss of radiative energy by the tropical energy in the post-Pinatubo period, suggesting that the models have still not properly captured the feedbacks between temperature change and clouds.”

Of course, there are also unresolved issues regarding a potential warm bias in the surface temperature data.

Climate sensitivity to CO2

A new paper by Chylek et al entitled:

Limits on climate sensitivity derived from recent satellite and surface observations

The climate sensitivity of 0.29 to 0.48 K/Wm-2 translates to warming between 1.1 and 1.8 deg C for doubling of CO2, supporting values close to the lower end of the IPCC range of 2 to 4.5 deg C. – Petr Chylek

Hurricanes

HURRICANES HAVE NOT INCREASED IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC

By William M. Briggs, Statistician

My paper on this subject will finally appear in the Journal of Climate soon. Download it here.

The gist is that the evidence shows that hurricanes have not increased in either number of intensity in the North Atlantic. I’ve only used data through 2006; which is to say, not this year’s. But if I were to, then, since the number and intensity of storms this past year were nothing special, the evidence would be even more conclusive that not much is going on.

Now, I did find that there were some changes in certain characteristics of North Atlantic storms. There is some evidence that the probability that strong (what are called Category 4 or 5) storms evolving from ordinary hurricanes has increased. But, there has also been an increase in storms not reaching hurricane level. Which is to say, that the only clear signal is that there has been an increase in the variability of intensity of tropical cyclones.

Of course, I do not say why this increase has happened. Well, I suggest why it has: changes in instrumentation quality and frequency since the late 1960s (which is when satellites first went up, allowing us to finally observe better). This is in line with what others, like Chris Landsea at the Hurricane Center, have found.

I also have done the same set of models of global hurricanes. I found the same thing. I’m scheduled to give a talk on this at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in January 2008 in New Orleans. That paper is here.

In another paper, Vecchi and Soden find natural climate variations have bigger effect on hurricane activity than global warming:

Vecchi, G.A. and B.J. Soden. 2007. Effect of remote sea surface temperature change on tropical cyclone potential intensity. Nature, 450, 1066-1071.