Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for April 25, 2008

Flannery – The Wrong Weather Maker

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RAIN sure is falling this week on the parade of our global warming alarmists.

Wettest of all is Tim Flannery, who was made Australian of the Year last year for wailing the world was doomed.

“I think there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis,” he groaned. But buy his The Weather Makers before you flee.

Reporters solemnly reported even this: “He (Flannery) also predicts that the ongoing drought could leave Sydney’s dams dry in just two years.”

And when did he say that? Oh, three years ago? Yet what do I read in my papers yesterday but this: “Sydney’s run of rainy days in a row – 11 – is the most in April for 77 years.”

And Sydney’s dams? Above 65 per cent capacity now, and rising.

…..it was probably no surprise Flannery didn’t turn up at the Rudd Government’s ideas summit last weekend to talk more about how warming was dooming Sydney, despite being issued a gold-edged invitation.

He flew to Canada instead to tell their yokels to cut gases like the ones he just blew out the back of his jet, and talked warming with British Columbia’s Premier and businessmen.

But once again Flannery picked the wrong time and place to preach his warming gospel. A local paper reports: “In some regions of usually balmy British Columbia, many were caught by surprise by a storm that moved in late Friday and set snowfall records in Nanaimo, Victoria and Vancouver.”

How the weather mocks Flannery. He’s flooded in Sydney, where he predicted drought, and snowed in in Canada when he predicted heat.

Read the entire article in The Herald Sun: Prophecy all washed up

Population, sustainability, climate change, water & the future of our cities

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Australia faces an unprecedented challenge from climate change. We risk losing our natural heritage, our rivers, landscapes and biodiversity. We have a brief opportunity to act now to safeguard and shape our future prosperity. – AUSTRALIA 2020 SUMMIT – INITIAL SUMMIT REPORT

One of the 100 privileged participants within the POPULATION, SUSTAINABILITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, WATER & FUTURE OF OUR CITIES topic area, proposed,

“A zero species loss by 2020 goal, and one of the ways that this could be achieved is through a comprehensive series of protected areas.”

Not one of the 100 participants argued in support of protecting the integrity of the evolutionary process.

Another participant stated,

“My understanding, from my work in natural resource management, biodiversity and so forth, we could stop any further degradation by 2020; that’s a feasible goal; most of it is government, not money…”

Again, no argument from participant expertise, along the lines of the 24-million feral pigs in Australia, as but one example.

The summit proposed that environmental considerations will be fully integrated into economic decision making in Australia, at the household, business and government levels, but there was no contention that legislation enacted in 1994 already required the integration of environmental and economic considerations in decision making and for balancing the interests of current and future generations.

I would have hoped that the more important recital would have recognized the historical lack of compliance as the preeminent issue and that future refinements would preclude non-compliance.

Indeed, the 1992 Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment expresses a significant achievement of environmental policy design and rather than reinventing the regulatory wheel, as-it-were, it could have formed the foundation for refinement towards the forum’s stated aims.

The delegation proposed the adoption of a National Sustainability, Population and Climate Change Agenda and the development of robust institutions to support it. As a part of this agenda, an audit function to report on governments’ performance against these climate change and sustainability objectives, would be included.

Again, the pre-existence of the National Environment Protection Council Act 1994, with its annual auditing and reporting functions, was conspicuous in its absence from the debate.

Interestingly, the Initial Summit Report indicated how strikingly and often concern arose that Australia has not been sufficiently clever in using the skills and ingenuity of its people.

This is despite Principle 22 of the 1992 RIO DECLARATION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, which states:

Indigenous people and their communities and other local communities have a vital role in environmental management and development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognise and duly support their identity, culture and interests and enable their effective participation in the achievement of sustainable development.

The Initial Summit Report did stipulate, however, the involvement of indigenous people, insofar as:

• A new dialogue will have been established with our indigenous peoples on our response to climate change, water and sustainability challenges;

• Stakeholder engagement, including with regional Australians, capacity building and education are needed to support the significant behavioural change required to implement these policies. Indigenous people must also be involved in policy development and implementation; and

• That a National Indigenous Knowledge Centre be established and maintained with indigenous people. This centre would examine multidisciplinary research and program delivery pertaining to climate change, sustainability and water.

However, the essence of environmental interdependence (in my opinion), binding individuals and families together in common possession, through the building block of both communities and nationhood, was largely overlooked. So too was the excellent practice of so many individuals, families and communities through existing commitments. There was rather the stale and familiar stench of enriching the bureaucratic stake in an illusion of environmental concern.

I would have preferred that Australia was rather re-defined by its people and their relationship with their natural environment. Surely it would have been better if Australia had been required to be supportive of its unique communities, bound in triumphant territorial respect for the aspirations, life and memory of their constituents. I would have thought it much more encouraging, if it was exposed to discomfort of its historically abhorrent dislocation of communities from their natural environment and in the same unequivocal terms that bind Australians to Australia.

I also believe that Australia’s adaptive strategy must be accommodated by the national strength of unity. The federal Government needs the solidarity of its people to act upon this global conviction and to bring the divisiveness of yesterday’s enviro-corruption to an unequivocal end. All Australians must annihilate the perverse belief that we condone the removal of people and communities as a condition of caring for the natural environment. We must rather stand united and restore dignity to our disenfranchised communities and revitalise their children’s futures.

Ozone Hole Recovery Could Modify Southern Hemisphere Climate

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A full recovery of the stratospheric ozone hole could modify climate change in the Southern Hemisphere and even amplify Antarctic warming, according to scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

ScienceDaily.com: ‘Ozone Hole Recovery May Reshape Southern Hemisphere Climate Change And Amplify Antarctic Warming’

Humans Nearly Wiped Out 70,000 Years Ago?

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Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.

The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.

The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.

CNN: ‘Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study says’

BBC News website: Human line ‘nearly split in two’

Norwegian Fishermen’s Union: NGOs a Threat to the World’s Food Resources – A Note From Ann Novek

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“This due to their campaigns against whaling and sealing. Their campaigns are against a reasonable and sustainable harvesting of marine resources,” states the Head of the Norwegian Fishermen’s Union, Reidar Nilsen, yesterday in paper, Fiskeribladet Fiskaren.

His reply was a response to WWF Norway that had made statements that the fishermen overfished the marine resources and thus were a threat to the world’s food resources, but Nilsen said the NGOs are a bigger threat to the world’s food resources through their anti whaling and anti sealing actions. According to Nilsen, it was in the fishermen’s own interest to conserve and harvest marine resources in a responsible way.

It seems as well that Mr. Nilsen’s statement has not as much to do with eating whale and seal meat but again as an “whales eat too much fish” argument. Nilson states that the whales are consuming 4 or 5 times as much fish than the fishermen are harvesting.

According to Norwegian animal welfare organisation, Dyrebeskyttelsen, It’s wrong to make scapegoats of the whales. They state, “The whales belong in the eco system, and that the fish the whales are eating are brought back to the eco system. Humans on the contrary are removing both fish and marine mammals from the system.”

We have also heard that the Norwegian IWC Commissioner, Mr. Klepsvik , has stated that the Norwegians are managing their marine resources in a holistic approach, meaning if they take out fish from the seas, they must also harvest whales.

Cheers,
Ann
Sweden

Signals for a Coming Ice Age: A Note from Peter Harris

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When paleoclimatologists met in 1972 to discuss how and when the present warm climate would end, termination seemed imminent and it was expected that rapid cooling would lead to the coming ice age.

These ideas were based on the 1M year analogue for climate transitions first proposed by M Milankovitch over 60 years ago which has been demonstrated to show the correlation of glacial and interglacial climate with solar insolation as it is modulated by our changing distance from the sun.

These data may be used to serve as a signal for the coming ice age.

Orbital geometry was approaching similar conditions to those of the previous transitions to ice.

But soon it was observed that global temperature was increasing and at about this time Global Climate Modeling (GCM) received more attention and the Milankovitch analogue was forgotten. There has been little further discussion about the coming ice age.

Perhaps underwriting the idea that our consumption of carbon and production of CO2 was contributing to climate warming was the work of Loutre and Berger and a paper by Loutre in 2000 claimed that the Holocene (the current warm period) would extend for at least another 30,000 (KY) years because of the effect of CO2 concentration as a greenhouse gas.

It was acknowledged in this paper that the orbital geometry 400KY which featured muted amplitude, was the “best and closest analogue to our near future climate”, but inexplicably the Global Climate Model LLN2-D NH was “tuned” to replicate the past 200KY climate transitions when insolation amplitude was at it’s highest level over the 400KY cycle and quite unlike present conditions. Using different values for CO2 it was found that “best agreement with SPECMAP is obtained near 210 ppmv CO2 ”.

Then using a modeled Holocene they projected climate using a range of CO2 forcing, and they reported that there was no transition to ice for at least 30KY into the future.

The algorithm for this process is not disclosed but the authors rightly list the limitations of the model in which CO2 is considered as an external forcing i.e. the carbon cycle is not simulated by the model. Clouds and the hydrological cycle are simplified and so is the heat transport to middle and deep ocean. In addition regional changes such as the North Atlantic and over Europe are not simulated “and might depart from the global trend”.

It is unfortunate that these limitations appear to have been ignored and the AGW hypothesis was born and has occupied science and the media ever since.

The Milankovich analogue has been forgotten.

But the reality is that CO2 is not driving temperature up , in fact the data below suggests that global temperature may be cooling since 1998 and CO2 continues to climb.

TEMPERATURE TREND 2007.jpg
Remote Sensing Systems Advanced Microwave Sounding Units. Satellite Temperature data analysis here: http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/feb-2008-rss-global-temperature-anomaly-near-zero-and-in-good-agreement-with-uah/

There is further detailed material in a paper by Dr Willie Soon which shows that there is no evidence to support global warming by CO2.

The concentration of CO2 varies according to the temperature of the ocean and CO2 follows temperature. If the present decline in temperature continues we can expect to see a decline in the rate of CO2 as more is dissolved in a cooler sea.

The climate trends during the Holocene, and also the regular sudden climate transitions between the ice ages and the interglacial climate over the past 1M years are better explained by reference to the great external driver, the Sun.

There is abundant archeological evidence to show that global temperature is closely correlated with solar activity.
The following chart shows how solar activity has correlated with climate during the Holocene. The data is based on analysis of Carbon 14 which varies in concentration according to the level of solar activity.

SOLAR ACTIVITY VS CLIMATE.jpg

Solar activity over the past 70 years has been greatest for 8000 years and is the most likely cause of the recent temperature trend through 1998 that has been wrongly attributed to CO2 warming.

The evidence for the solar insolation signal for the ice ages is contained in the Milankovitch analogue which has been overlooked for many years.

The following data was compiled by the mathematicians Quinn and Levine (Quinn et al 1991, A 3 Million year Integration of Earths Orbit, The Astronomical Journal Vol 101 pp 2287-2305). Insolation values due to Precession, Obliquity and Eccentricity as well as total insolation or Solar Forcing are charted on the same time scale as Stages of Glaciation representing climate. This climate data was provided by Lisieckie and Raymo and is based on sediment proxies. The climate data shows close agreement with Ice core data based on a different proxy.
This chart confirms the correlation of climate transitions with insolation which is modulated by earth’s position in orbit and was first proposed by Milutin Milankovitch over 60 years ago.

CORRELATION CLIMATE MILANKOVITCH.jpg
Milankovich Analogue Data, from Quinn et al. 1991

The signal for each transition to ice can be found by careful inspection of the data and projections.

In studying the analogue there is no use of a GCM (general circulation model) which is subject to limitations and interpretation. Use of the analogue is based on simple observation of clear empirical data and the archeological record of temperature. The data and the correlation are sound.

The interglacial stages are shaded grey by the authors, and the glacial stages are clear.

By reference to this chart we can make the following observations:

* Every interglacial (shaded grey) survives for a single half cycle maximum in Solar Forcing or total insolation, (yellow) and expires when insolation is in rapid decline and we are near that position now. The interglacials at 200 and 600KY are split because Precession (red) and Obliquity (green) combine in opposite phase to defeat Eccentricity and the interglacial temporarily returns to ice. Conversely total insolation at 400KY is forced into a second half cycle and the interglacial is extended to 28,000 years. Because muted Eccentricity at 400KY is considered a precedent for present conditions, the 28KY interglacial has been widely misreported as evidence for an extended Holocene. From the data we can see we have no such additional insolation half cycle. Insolation now is in rapid decline from a single peak.

* Each of the “Ice Ages” over the past 1M years corresponds with the minimum half cycle of Eccentricity (blue) which is the predominant orbital factor. We are close to the eccentricity half cycle minimum now.

* Counter intuitively every transition occurs from peak global T ;We may have a decline in T since a peak in 1998 .

* It follows that every transition occurs when polar ice melt has peaked. We have ice rebuilding in some regions now.

* Last transition to ice occurred about 120KY ago when T was 5 degC hotter than now and polar ice melt was greater than now. The average cycle is 100KY and the coming transition is overdue.

* By inspection we can see that all of the transitions have occurred when Solar Forcing ie total Insolation was very close to the present level.

* In addititon to the above which relates to the Milankovitch cycles we have a coincident decline in solar activity.
Solar activity is dormant now and cycle 24 is delayed.

The variations in Insolation seen in the data are not sufficient alone to explain the sudden climate transitions from interglacial to ice and reverse. The data provides a template for timing the changes based on the extended correlation but there must be an internal mechanism to explain the rapid process.

At the tipping point for each transition, global T has peaked. This follows from the fact that Earth has been receiving peak insolation throughout the interglacial for about 10,000 years. Polar ice melt has peaked and the polar seas are freshened which may affect circulation of the MOC and interrupt heat exchange with the equator leading to sudden NH cooling.

In addition it has been proposed by William Kininmonth, meteorologist and former head of Australia’s National Climate centre, that atmospheric heat and humidity transport to the NH would offer a larger contribution to variations in heat budget if it could be shown to respond to the 100KY cycle.

I think that this factor which is driven by equatorial SST will indeed have a 100KY signature because the transitions correspond to T max. which follows the 100KY cycle. SST will also peak near T max in accordance with the 100KY cycle.

This proposal offers the further advantage that it would provide a faster response which helps to explain the rapid climate change observed in the transitions.

It is significant to note that at this tipping point, energy transport to the northern hemisphere is at a peak and there is abundant humidity transported to the NH at a critical time when insolation is in rapid decline.

These are the conditions which favour maximum precipitation in the northern hemisphere winter.

These are the conditions now.

I think that the rapid decline to ice conditions will occur by the following process:
As temprature declines the precipitation will increasingly be snow and as albedo increases more heat will be reflected. Initially cloud cover will insulate the snow from summer insolation. Insolation continues to decline.
As temperature further declines water vapour in the northern hemisphere will be reduced and at T zero deg C it will practically disappear leading to a sudden elimination of water vapour GHG .

Then positive feedback due to this process will lead to a rapidly widening region of sub zero T and glaciation will begin to expand.

There will be a decrease in cloud cover allowing more heat to escape in winter.

In this way the sudden transition to ice has commenced.

The geological record shows that the transitions are sudden, long term and extreme.

All of the Milankovitch parameters for a transition are satisfied by the present orbital position. We have already seen extreme northern hemisphere winter conditions and temperature appears to be declining in the short term. The decline will continue under rapidly declining insolation and the coincident effect of reduced solar activity which has also been correlated with temperature in the past.

It is possible that we may have already entered the sudden stage of the transition.

I would challenge: is there a good reason why the analogue will not apply now?

It is overdue time for engineers and scientists to reconsider the Milankovitch analogue and to plan for the contingency of an imminent transition to ice.

I think that the AGW hypothesis has proven to be a costly diversion of resources .

Peter Harris
Retired Engineer