Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for July 8, 2008

No Extension of World Heritage Area into Tall Tassie Forests: Peter Garrett

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In a media release Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, yesterday welcomed the World Heritage Committee’s consideration at its meeting in Quebec, Canada, of an expert report on Australia’s management of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

The report, prepared by an expert mission sent by the World Heritage Committee to Tasmania in March, was based on extensive consultation, field research and rigorous examination of many long standing issues.

“It is pleasing the experts concluded that the outstanding universal values of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area are being satisfactorily managed, as are potential threats from production forestry outside the World Heritage boundary”, Mr Garrett said.

The mission also found that the Regional Forest Agreement and Tasmania’s forest practices system provide an appropriate framework for managing conservation values outside of the World Heritage Area.

The World Heritage Committee suggested a number of additional measures to enhance protection of possible values outside the existing World Heritage Area. These include possible adjustment of the World Heritage Area to include 21 areas of national parks and state reserves that are already covered by the World Heritage management plan but currently outside the boundary, and enhancing resources and capacity for the conservation of archaeological and Aboriginal sites.

Mr Garrett noted that both the Australian and Tasmanian Governments have responsibilities in relation to the World Heritage Area and would cooperate in carefully considering the implications of the World Heritage Committee recommendations.

The Australian Government agreed in-principle with the recommendations to extend the 1.3 million hectare Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area to include the additional 21 formal reserves recommended by the expert mission.

Mr Garrett also noted that the expert mission found no extension of the World Heritage area into tall eucalypt forests was warranted as the World Heritage area already includes a good representation of tall eucalypts. This contrasted with the World Heritage Committee’s request to consider, at Australia’s discretion, a further extension of the World Heritage Area in these forests.

The Australian Government has no plans to extend the current boundary into production forests.

Mr Garrett said that the Australian Government agreed in principle with the recommendations of the five yearly review of the implementation of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement and is working with the Tasmanian Government towards this implementation.

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area is one of 17 World Heritage properties in Australia. Inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1982, and extended in 1989, the Tasmanian Wilderness is one of the world’s largest World Heritage Areas and covers 20% of the entire Tasmanian landmass.

Climate Change Dogmatists Don’t Know When to Stop

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The price of meat, milk and other British farm products will have to rise to reflect the environmental cost of producing them, a government study has concluded.

A Cabinet Office review of food policy suggests that farmers and consumers should pay extra for farm goods that generate large amounts of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.

The proposal, the latest in a string of “green” plans that threaten to increase the cost of living, drew accusations that ministers were imposing taxes and regulations in the name of environmental policy.

….The Department for Business and Enterprise’s new renewable energy strategy warned last month that household electricity bills could rise by 13 per cent and gas by 37 per cent to subsidise green energy sources, and
ministers remain under pressure to raise road taxes in an effort to cut emissions.

Telegraph.co.uk: ‘Meat and milk prices will rise to reflect environmental costs’

Measuring Global Temperatures

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“If we are to understand the real state of the world, we need to focus on the fundamentals and we need to look at realities, not myths.” Bjorn Lomborg, 2001

According to geological history the earth has been warming for about 18,000 years and over this period sea levels have risen over 100 metres.

While the overall temperature trend has been one of warming, there have been ups and downs due to natural climatic variations. So, if we consider the last 2,000 years of global temperature anomalies there was the Medieval Warm Period followed by the Little Ice Age and then a period of relative rapid warming during the 20th century, Figure 1.

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Figure 1. 2,000 Years of Reconstructed Global Temperature Anomalies. Based on Loehle, C. 2007. Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058. Thermometer data was added for 1850 -2007 by Roy W Spencer. From more information see http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

It was not until the development of the thermometer that temperatures could be measured with accuracy.

The Central England Temperature Series is considered the world’s longest series; the monthly mean begins in 1659, during the Little Ice Age.

The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in conjunction with the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorology Office provide global temperature data going back only as far as 1850. This information is updated on a monthly basis.

It is this data set that is used by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for global temperature trends, Figure 2.

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Figure 2. The Global Temperature Anomaly for the period 1850 to 2007.

It is important to realize that Figures 1 and 2 show temperatures anomalies, not actual temperature. An anomaly is something that deviates from what is considered standard, normal or expected. The anomaly in Figure 2 shows the deviation from the mean temperature for the period 1961 to 1990.

We have become familiar with this representation of global temperatures but it is contrived to emphasis difference and in particular the extent to which temperatures have increased from 1850 to the present. When the same data is plotted just showing the actual global mean temperature for the same time period, the trend is no longer evident, Figure 3.

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Figure 3. Global Mean Temperature from 1850 – 2007

The data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in conjunction with the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorology Office is generally accepted by those who subscribe to the idea that carbon dioxide is driving dangerous man-made global warming, as well as by the so-called climate skeptics. There are other organisations that collect information on global temperatures including the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in the US which claims to have the world’s largest archive of climate data.

Well known advisor to Al Gore, James Hansen, from NASA’s Goddard Space Institute has developed what is known as a GISS surface temperature analysis. This data set has shown more warming over recent years than the CRU data from the UK Meteorology Office and some argue that this is because the Hansen system overemphasizes temperatures at the North Pole.

There are ongoing arguments over the accuracy of the various data sets and methods of analysis. Ross McKitrick from Canada’s University of Guelph argues that 50 percent of global warming measured by land-based thermometers in the US since 1980 is due to local influences of man-made structures, also known as The Urban Heat Island Effect. When James Hansen recalculated temperatures in 2006 using a corrected algorithm, 1934 rather than 1998 was found to be the hottest in the last 100 years in the US. There have also been issues with the additions and losses of weather stations; for example many weather stations were lost in places like Siberia with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, thermometer temperature data has only been collected in the polar-regions since the 1940s and calculating the mean temperature at the poles is still difficult because of the sparseness of ground-based weather stations and the freezing environment takes its toll on equipment.

Bill Kininmonth, former head of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, has suggested that because of the difficulty of assessing surface temperatures over ice surfaces it is more realistic to consider sea surface temperatures in places like the south pole and exclude areas of seasonal sea ice.

Dr Hansen has explained the general difficulty of measuring surface temperatures, “Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10 ft or 50 ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rainforest), the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50 ft of air either above ground or above the top of the vegetation. To measure SAT (surface air temperature) we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted. Even if the 50 ft standard were adopted, I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50 ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.”

Given these difficulties an alternative is to use temperature data from satellites.

Since 1979, Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs) on orbiting satellites have measured the intensity of upwelling microwave radiation from atmospheric oxygen with the intensity proportional to the temperature of vertical layers of the atmosphere. The research focus has been on getting a broadly representative measure of lower atmosphere temperature.

The satellite record of temperature in Figure 4, is from Roy Spencer at the https://viagragener.com University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and corrects for previous errors including orbital drift. Dr Spencer is the US Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua Satellite.

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Figure 4. Monthly globally averaged lower atmospheric temperature anomaly since 1979 as measured by NOAA and NASA satellites. For more information see http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

Figure 4 is another graph showing the temperature anomaly; in this case the deviation for the period 1979 – June 2008 from the mean temperature for the period 1979-1998.

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Figure 3 is based on ‘Certainty clouds the IPCC’ by Sinclair Davidson and Alex Robson, IPA Review, March 2007, from page 7. You can read the article here: http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/898/certainly-clouds-the-ipcc

How the National Electricity Grid Works in Australia

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“Until the 1990s, Australia had a series of separate regional power grids. We now have a system linked almost across the nation – a system which, when well managed, is cheaper and more reliable. In the late 1980s, governments finally came to see that the existing state monopoly power commissions were amazingly inefficient and hungry for great gobs of capital for new power stations and coal mines.

“The greater reliability of a connected system is just as important as the cost savings. With a national grid and a national market, it is possible to provide softer cushions against natural or man-made catastrophes: a spiraling cyclone, a stinking hot afternoon (one of the worst risks), the collapse of a transmission tower, or, to take a gloomy view, a terrorist attack.

“So it is hardly surprising that state governments should have looked for a new way to keep the lights on. Of course, when talking to their voters back home, they still kept assuring their constituents – and still do – that they were looking after their power, that they were making sure that their state’s power supply is in good shape. The fact is that now all of the connected states rely upon each other and NEMMCO, to keep the whole show firing.

“As a result, much the same amount of base generating capacity can meet our needs now as 20 years ago. And, when precarious episodes have arisen, the wizards at NEMMCO managed to keep the system up, and you, good citizens, probably neither heard nor worried about it.

But … read more from Gavan McDonell at OLO about South Australia’s special role in the administration of all of this: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585&page=0