Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 2008

Potentially Even Bigger Feral Cats to be Imported into Australia

By

Feral cats, along with wild dogs and foxes, are thought to have a devastating impact on populations of small native animals in parts of the Australian bush. But the future may be even bleaker with a larger and more ferocious breed of cat, known as the Savannah, expected to be introduced into Australia in the next five years.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

“More than 30 savannahs – which cost $5000 for a pet and $10,000 for a breeding animal – are expected to come to Australia in the next five years, with up to 16 now in US quarantine.

“Hybrids of wild animals and domestic animals are a stupid American trend to breed more and more exotic pets,” said Professor Peacock, who works at the University of Canberra.

“This loophole will effectively lead to fitting a nuclear warhead to our already devastating feral cat population. Haven’t our native animals got enough to contend with?”

“Mr Parker dismissed suggestions that the animals could threaten native wildlife, saying they would not be allowed to roam. The company demands that customers sign a contract stipulating specific housing arrangements.

Read more here.

A Note from James Inhofe on Lonely Battles

By

“What a difference three years makes: In 2005, I led the charge against a massive global warming cap-and-trade bill. It was a lonely battle with few GOP members willing to join me on the Senate floor to publicly oppose it.

“Fast forward to June 2008: Not only was I joined by dozens of GOP Senators, but nearly 30% of the Democratic Senators rebelled against their leadership and opposed the Boxer Climate Tax Bill. In the end, Senator Boxer only had at most 35 Democratic Senators willing to vote for final passage on the largest tax bill in U.S. history. The Boxer Climate Tax Bill was so thoroughly disowned by Democratic Leadership that proponents of climate taxes will now be forced to start from scratch next year.

“Republicans were prepared to debate the bill and were ready to offer amendments. But the Democrats did not want to debate, much less vote, on our amendments that were aimed at protecting American families and workers from the devastating economic impacts of this bill. When faced with the inconvenient truth of the bill’s impact on skyrocketing gas prices, it was Democratic Senators who wanted to see this bill die a quick death…

Read more here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=27000

Dems Running on Empty, in HumanEvents.com, by Sen. James Inhofe (more by this author)
Posted 06/16/2008 ET

Validation, Evaluation and Exaggeration from the IPCC: A Note from Vincent Gray

By

The first United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report had a Chapter headed “Validation of Climate Models”. A similar Chapter occurred in the first draft of the Second Report. I commented that since no climate model has ever been validated, the word was inappropriate. The next draft had changed the Title, and the words “Validated” or “Validation” to “Evaluated” or “Evaluation” fifty times. Since then the word “validation” is never used, only “evaluate”.

No IPCC document has even discussed what measures might be required before a computer model of the climate might be “validated”

“Validation” is a term used by computer engineers to describe the process of testing of a computer model before it can be made use of. It has to include a capacity to forecast future behaviour to satisfactory level of accuracy. Since no such procedure has ever been carried out for any climate model they are not only completely unsuitable for future forecasts, but the level of accuracy of any such forecast is unknown. As a result they are unable to place levels of reliability on any of the models, or on any “projection’ resulting from them..

The Glossary to the IPCC 4th Report does not contain a mention of either “validation” or “evaluation’, but it is plain in the text that “evaluation” includes “attribution” which derives a cause/effect relationship from a “correlation” contrary to the demands of basic logic.

From the Glossary on “Detection and Attribution”:

“Detection and attribution Climate varies continually on all time scales. Detection of climate change is the process of demonstrating that climate has changed in some defined statistical sense, without providing a reason for that change. Attribution of causes of climate change is the process of establishing the most likely causes for the detected change with some defined level of confidence.”

The use of the term “attribution” evades the firm logical principle that a correlation, however convincing, does not prove cause and effect, not even to any level of “likelihood” or spurious “probability. Their “attribution” process consists in downgrading, distorting and even ignoring alternative reasons for a correlation in order to claim that their explanation had been proved.

The IPCC admit that none of there models have been properly validated, because they refuse to use the word “forecast”, only “projection”. A “projection” is merely the consequence of the initial assumptions and it has no value as a forecast unless it has been tested against future climate behaviour.

This is what the Glossary says:

“Climate prediction A climate prediction or climate forecast is the result of an attempt to produce an estimate of the actual evolution of the climate in the future, for example, at seasonal, interannual or long-term time scales. Since the future evolution of the climate system may be highly sensitive to initial conditions, such predictions are usually probabilistic in nature. See also Climate projection; Climate scenario; Predictability.

Climate projection A projection of the response of the climate system to emission or concentration scenarios of greenhouse gases and aerosols, or radiative forcing scenarios, often based upon simulations by climate models. Climate projections are distinguished from climate predictions in order to emphasize that climate projections depend upon the emission/concentration/radiative forcing scenario used, which are based on assumptions concerning, for example, future socioeconomic and technological developments that may or may not be realised and are therefore subject to substantial uncertainty.

Predictability The extent to which future states of a system may be predicted based on knowledge of current and past states of the system. Since knowledge of the climate system’s past and current states is generally imperfect, as are the models that utilise this knowledge to produce a climate prediction, and since the climate system is inherently nonlinear and chaotic, predictability of the climate system is inherently limited. Even with arbitrarily accurate models and observations, there may still be limits to the predictability of such a nonlinear system (AMS, 2000)”

These definitions confuse the separate role played by the models and the scenarios. The models merely “project” the rate at which “radiative forcing” increases with increase in greenhouse gases. They cannot be used to “project” what might happen in the future without “scenarios” which are guesses of the future economic development of the world, from which future emissions of greenhouse gases may be deduced. Then, they have to use anothert set of unvalidated models to calculate how much of these emissions might end up in the atmosphere, so the climate models can calculate the radiative forcing, and from that the temperature increase.

The resulting “range” of temperature and other properties for the year 2100 is therefore completely arbitrary; so the actual levels are decided by the demands of the politicians. The “Low” figure could easily be negative, but oh no! it has to be just a bit high. The “HIgh” figure is what the market will bear currently and it has therefore changed over the years. There have been several occasions in my experience of the IPCC when it had to be suddenly raised, doubtless after a call from the politicians. They used such devices as inventing an extra severe scenario (A1F1) or an extra severe model to do this.

The “High figure is the most important as it is the one used by the Al Gores and Nicholas Sterns of this world to scare us into escalating economic disaster

Since none of the curves have a known or calculable level of accuracy the range could be indefinitely extended in both the upwards and downwards directions. The IPCC actually say this; but, of course, only for the upward direction

Here is what the Glossary says about the Scenarios:

“Climate scenario A plausible and often simplified representation of the future climate, based on an internally consistent set of climatological relationships that has been constructed for explicit use in investigating the potential consequences of anthropogenic climate change, often serving as input to impact models. Climate projections often serve as the raw material for constructing climate scenarios, but climate scenarios usually require additional information such as about the observed current climate. A climate change scenario is the difference between a climate scenario and the current climate.”

These scenarios have not been developed by scientists, but by environmental activist economists attached to the IPCC WGIII (Impacts) Committee, and they are generally grossly exaggerated. Even the figures chosen for the beginning (2000) are all wrong; so they are even unable to predict the past.

The scenarios have been roundly criticised by expert economists. without response. They include such outrageous assumptions as:

1. a 12-fold increase in coal consumption,
2. increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide of 1% a year, instead of the current 0.4%,
3. increases in atmospheric methane, instead of the current fall,
4. absurd increases in Gross National Product, and population,

They were foisted on the scientists of the IPCC Committee WGI (Science) without consultation, so that the future can be confidently exaggerated by them.

Cheers
Vincent Gray
Wellington, New Zealand

Why are so Many TV Meteorologists and Weathercasters Climate Skeptics?

By

All three staff meteorologists at [American] KLTV, the ABC affiliate broadcasting to the Tyler-Longview-Jacksonville area of Northeast Texas, joined forces last November to deliver an on-air rebuttal of the idea that humans are changing the earth’s climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, representing the work of hundreds of scientists from 130 countries, had declared eight months earlier that warming of the atmosphere was “unequivocal” and that greenhouse gases from human activities were “very likely” the cause of most of the warming since the mid-20th century.

The three KLTV weathercasters – appearing in a Nov. 8 story by a station news reporter – let it be known, however, that they were unconvinced.

Meteorologist Grant Dade: “Is the Earth warming? Yes, I think it is. But is man causing that? No. It’s a simple climate cycle our climate goes through over thousands of years.”

Read more of the story by Bill Dawson at ‘The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media’ by clicking here: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/features/0608_tv.htm

Further in the article there is also comment that:

The disagreements between television weathercasters and climate scientists involve “a jurisdictional war,” and “there’s nobody free of sin in this matter,” Knight said. “I’m seeing a row here, but it’s not a bad row.”

On one side, there seems to be “a disdain in the orthodox scientific research community for those who are not smart enough to get a Ph.D. or do research, and instead go into the fluff of television and just forecast the weather,” he said.

On the other side, “there’s a certain amount of disdain from television meteorologists who are predicting the weather for those who pontificate about what their [climate] models show,” he added.

Knight summed up his own view of climate change this way: “There’s no question that warming is going on. To say it’s a hoax is to deny the data. To say it’s all human-caused is foolish, too.”

A Note on Temperature Anomalies by Tom Quirk (Part 2)

By

One of the most vexing things about climate change is the endless debate about temperatures. Did they rise, did they fall or were they pushed? At times it seems like a Monty Python sketch following either the Dead Parrot or the 5 or 10 Minute Argument… So began Part 1 of ‘A Note on Temperature Anomalies’ in which Tom Quirk looked at the correlation of the five temperature series and concluded that it is surprising to see the agreement achieved by two quite independent approaches.

In response to a question following this post about the real temperature fluctuations on a monthly basis, Tom calculated the the standard deviations from a covariance analysis, Table 3.

“The last two rows are from averaging the ground based results and averaging the satellite results and then making a comparison.

Table 3
tom Quirk table3_temp.JPG

The temperature and common fluctuations on the ground based constructs must be around 0.09 0C for the standard deviation.

GISS has a larger standard deviation so 0.09 0C would be easily accommodated along with the manipulations for the extra total standard deviation.

Finally the satellite data has a different and larger standard deviation to the ground based results. Perhaps the atmosphere is more turbulent than the oceans that must have a soothing effect on temperature fluctuations, as they have the largest heat memory of the components, land, sea and air.

Tom Quirk
Melbourne”

Shooting Roos to Save Rangelands? by Nichole Hoskin

By

There are claims that the presence of too many sheep, cattle and kangaroos are damaging Australia’s rangelands and that commercial shooting of kangaroos will reduce overall grazing pressure.

In an article published today at On Line Opinion entitled ‘Kangaroo: Designed for our Times’ by Executive Officer of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, John Kelly, he writes that commercial harvesting of roos delivers, “a direct environmental benefits in our fragile arid rangelands where kangaroos are harvested” and that “these are extremely fragile areas which can support a limited number of grazing animals” and that “allowing the grazing pressure from all animals to increase is one of the most serious environmental hazards in these rangelands.”

Population numbers of red and grey kangaroos can fluctuate from 15 to 50 million. Under current government policy, 10-15 percent of this population is shot in any one year. So, commercial harvesting can potentially reduce grazing pressure particularly by limiting increases in wet years.

On the other hand, commercial shooting of kangaroos will not relieve grazing pressure if there is a corresponding increase in numbers of other grazing herbivores, such as sheep, cattle and ferals including horses, donkeys, camels, rabbits, buffalo and deer.

Gordon Grigg, an Australian expert on kangaroos, argues that, “Most of the grazing lands, unfortunately, show everywhere abundant signs of the foot and tooth pressure of the introduced hardfooted stock and there is simply no room for doubt that running sheep in the fragile arid inland has done a lot of damage. Graziers will argue that they obey the stocking rates recommended and many of them do, perhaps even most of them do. Maybe even all of them do, but the fact of the matter remains that the damage is everywhere evident.”

It remains unclear what proportion of grazing pressure directly results from kangaroos.