Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for January 2008

More Examples of Energy Policy Being Strangled by Canutian Climate Control

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A draft New Zealand Energy Strategy is dominated by the Government’s conviction that climate change (more properly described as “man-made global warming”) is happening and that we must develop renewable energy to save New Zealand from disaster.

The strategy ignores the uncertainties in the evidence claimed to support the belief that man-made global warming is real and dangerous. It cannot explain why, before the days of man-made CO2, the world was warmer during the Middle Ages, Roman and Minoan warm periods. The whole of the Energy Strategy is based on the assumption that the “scenarios” and “projections” of dangerous warming generated by unproven climate models are accurate predictions.

Read the rest of The New Zealand Herald article: ‘Brian Leyland: Powering our future or wrecking the economy?’

Meanwhile, in California controversial legislation is also pending to control energy use, in particular:

“In California, we have 236 pages of state-mandated standards for building energy efficiency, known as Title 24…

…What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them….

…The real question poised by this invasion of the sanctity of our homes by state power is — why are we doing this? It seems to me to be the wrong fix for a problem that we don’t have to have. The common sense alternative is to build new power plants so that power shortages don’t occur. Of course, they can’t be coal or nuclear power plants! The coastal elites have their minds set against those undesirables. The state has wasted billions of our dollars on wind generation that hasn’t helped to meet peak loads. For natural gas, offshore drilling should be considered. While we have one liquefied natural gas terminal in Mexico supplying us with Indonesian and, in the near future, Russian, LNG, another receiving terminal to be supplied by Australian LNG was rejected by the State Coastal Commission.

While nowhere in the Bill of Rights is there explicitly a right to set one’s own thermostat to whatever temperature one desires (and is able to pay for), the new PCT requirement certainly seems to violate the “a man’s home is his castle” common law dictum.

Californians have until January 30th to send their opinions and comments on the pending revisions to Title 24 to the California Energy Commission and state legislators.

Read the whole article: ‘Who Will Control Your Thermostat?’ in American Thinker.

Plan to Hunt Humpbacks Just a Ploy: A Translation from Ann Novek

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I’ve done a rough translation of an insightful article from the Icelandic Minke Whaler’s Association which suggests the Japanese never intended to hunt Humpback whales in the Antarctic:

The Japanese spectacle continues…

During the annual International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Anchorage in May 2007, the Japanese were tough negotiators. They wanted permission to kill humpbacks in the Antarctic, held press conferences and wanted to withdraw from the IWC if their proposals weren’t accepted.

Therefore the decision to hunt humpbacks this Austral summer didn’t come as a surprise and the entire whale discussions was now focused on the humpback hunt and not about the 950 minkes and 50 Fin whales.

The Icelandic whalers now state that the Japanese are very smart and cunning. The Japanese have now declared that they will halt the humpback hunt (a hunt that the Japanese actually never have had an intention to carry out) and now the Japanese stand out as Mr. Nice Guys.

Now the Icelandic whalers want that their esteemed Minister of Agriculture to announce at the beginning of 2008, that Iceland has an intention to increase their whale hunting quotas substantially, 600 minkes, 300 Fins and 50 humpbacks. This would cause an international outcry from “environmentalists”. We would defend ourselves with all kinds of arguments but finally cave in, and half the quota and completely ignore the humpbacks (but this would depend on how the discussions did carry out).

Cheers,
Ann Novek
in Sweden

New Australian Government Not Meeting Expectations on Whaling

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When the new Rudd government was elected in Australia late last year all sorts of promises were made about ending Japanese whaling in the Antarctic including monitoring the whaling fleet. But according to a recent article in the The Australian the government’s stated intention have gotten stuck in neutral:

“A docked Australian ship supposedly monitoring Japanese whaling vessels may have missed observing half of Japan’s annual whale cull.

“Revelations that the Customs Ship Oceanic Viking was still in Fremantle has prompted the Coalition to claim that the Rudd Government was asleep at the wheel and had gone into holiday mode.

“Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt this morning called on the Government to stop partying and going to the cricket, and get back to the job of government.”

And when the Australian government does decide to start monitoring, it will be keeping the Japanese whaling fleet’s location secret, and this is a betrayal of public trust according to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald:

“THE anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd has condemned the Federal Government’s decision to keep the location of the Japanese whaling fleet secret.

“‘The move was a betrayal that would withhold vital information from anti-whaling groups,’ Paul Watson, of Sea Shepherd, said.

“‘Once again the cards are stacked against us, as governments continue to co-operate with each other to maintain the status quo,’ he said, adding the Government owed it to the Australian public to say where the fleet was.

Links and text from JG Moebus in California

Exceptional rainfall produces exceptionally clean waterways

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CooperCk.jpg

I recently reported that the wet season had well and truly arrived in the Daintree, with over 700 mm of rain in five days.

More recently, Jennifer published the Australian mean rainfall total for 2007 at 497 mm, slightly more than the long-term average of 472 mm.

So, there is no question; the Daintree Cape Tribulation rainforest occupies a very wet part of Australia. Last year we recorded a total rainfall of 4,757 mm and the year before; 6,240 mm.

The most recent deluge, though, was of an intensity not seen for many years. In March of 1996, I recall that 1,219 mm fell in 48 hours. Flooding was so powerful that the Daintree River Ferry was deposited upon its pylons and the road across the heights of the Alexandra section, collapsed.

It must be said, that here in the Daintree rainforest, we brace ourselves in the face of extreme weather events, but they also remind us unequivocally of our subordinance to nature.

If I were to conservatively estimate that only one direct cyclone was to have hit every fifty years, the ancient rainforests of the Daintree would have bore the brunt of 2.7million cyclones over its 135-million year existence. On this basis, it becomes a very regular and recurring event.

In the aftermath, perhaps half the canopy is dislodged to the forest floor and as much as twice the sunlight is able to penetrate to these leafy depths of nutrient abundance. There can be no doubt that the extent of flowering and fruiting is maximised after cyclonic events. All other populations seem to multiply.

And the creeks become magnificent!

2007 Coldest this Century: Lubos Motl

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With the end of the year, and all the global warming hype, I’ve been trying to understand how hot 2007 really was globally and also the direction in which temperatures are now trending considering the satellite and near surface measurements at the NOAA and Hadley websites respectively. Of course raw numbers, graphed and ungraphed, can give a different impression depending on your starting point – be that 1979 when satellite data was first collected, 1900 when surface temperatures were already being collected, or 1998 the hottest year so far.

Nevertheless, the various data sets do suggest that globally 1998 is still far and away the hottest and that temperatures have been stable or in decline since then. Also given 1998 was so hot, and only ten years ago, and that increases and decreases in temperature tend to be incremental it is not surprising that last year can be described as the sixth or seventh warmest even if the trend is one of cooling. But is it?

Anyway, I was surprised, but also interested, to see the analysis by Lubos Motl at this blog (http://motls.blogspot.com ). He’s a physicist and has been looking at the same data sets as I have over the last few days but coming to much more interesting and definitive conclusions including that the linear trend for the satellite data for the 1998 -2007 interval is -0.48C and that December 2007 was cooler than the average December since 1979.

Read the complete blog post here: http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-warmest-year-on-record-coldest-in.html

RSS MSU Anomalies 2005-2007.jpg
[from http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-warmest-year-on-record-coldest-in.html showing global cooling over the short interval 2005-2007]

Sun Bears (Part 2)

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The world’s smallest species of bear, the sun bear ( Helarctos malayanus ), was classed as ‘Vulnerable’ and accepted for inclusion in the IUCN Red List in November 2007.**

The international organisation that regulates trade in endangered species, CITES, had already listed sun bear as threatened with extinction and notes that there is a trade in sun bear ‘body parts’ including for traditional medicines as discussed at a previous blog post Sun Bears (Part 1).

The sun bear lives in mainland Southeast Asia, Sumatra and Borneo and was previously listed as Data Deficient byt the IUCN, meaning that not enough was known about the species to give it a status on the Red List.

Sun bear C Gabriella Fredriksson copy .jpg
This picture of a sun bear is published with permission from Gabriella Frediksson (via Ann Novek).

Rob Steinmetz, co-chair of the IUCN Bear Specialist Group’s sun bear expert team, said in November that: “We estimate that sun bears have declined by at least 30 percent over the past 30 years (three bear generations)…
Deforestation has reduced both the area and quality of their habitat. Where habitat is now protected, commercial poaching remains a significant threat.”

[Thanks to Ann Novek for the picture and link to the IUCN media release.]

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** The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species classifies species according to their extinction risk. It is a searchable online database containing the global status and supporting information on more than 41,000 species. Its primary goal is to identify and document the species most in need of conservation attention and provide an index of the state of biodiversity. The IUCN Red List threat categories are the following, in descending order of threat:

1. Extinct or Extinct in the Wild;

2. Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable: species threatened with global extinction;

3. Near Threatened: species close to the threatened thresholds or that would be threatened without ongoing specific conservation measures;

4. Least Concern: species evaluated with a low risk of extinction;

5. Data Deficient: no evaluation because of insufficient data.