Sydney wants green to be the dominant colour in its massive New Year’s Eve fireworks and festivities to herald in 2009. Read more here.
Archives for December 2008
No ‘Happy New Year’ for Koalas in the Central Murray Valley
THE Victorian Premier, John Brumby, has waited until New Year’s Eve to announce the end of timber harvesting and grazing in 83,000 hectares of red gum forest in the Central Murray Valley in north western Victoria, Australia.
The creation of new national parks was a 2006 election promise to secure inner-city votes but is based on a lie – on the false belief that by declaring an area a national park you can somehow “save it”.
In reality the red gums of the mid-Murray need water and thinning and a national park declaration will achieve neither. The national park declaration will simply increase the risk of wild fires and the death of koalas.
The Rivers and Red Gum Alliance, representing local forest users, provided the government with a well research plan whereby 104,000 hectares could be managed under the principles of the internationally recognised Ramsar convention.
As Peter Newman, chairman of the Alliance, explained yesterday, “The forests exist in a highly modified landscape surrounded by farmland and need active management to maintain forest health. This includes fuel reduction through controlled grazing and thinning of the red gum trees to keep the forest open and in a healthy state.”
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Dishonest Advertising on the ETS: AEF Media Release
GetUp’s global warming television ads (to air today) are dishonest and inaccurate, according to Dr Jennifer Marohasy, Chair of the Australian Environment Foundation.
“For all sorts of reasons a number of groups, of which Internet campaigners GetUp.org.au are one, are pretending that the Rudd Government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme is a minor 5 to15 percent adjustment to our way of life”.
“In fact, the government’s ETS will reduce the amount of energy available to every man; woman and child currently living in the country by an extraordinary 35 percent, absent the discovery and implementation of an unknown source of carbon free energy in the next ten years”.
Dr Marohasy said that this would be the equivalent of closing down all of Australia’s manufacturing and half its rural industries.
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Global Warming is Over: Don Easterbrook
IN 2001 geologist Don Easterbook predicted the beginning of a period of global cooling. At a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco he again predicted a period of cooling based in part on correlation between past glacial fluctuations, his area of expertise, with periods of low solar irradiance and changes in the Pacific Ocean:
“GLOBAL, cyclic, decadal, climate patterns can be traced over the past millennium in glacier fluctuations, oxygen isotope ratios in ice cores, sea surface temperatures, and historic observations. The recurring climate cycles clearly show that natural climatic warming and cooling have occurred many times, long before increases in anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 levels. The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are well known examples of such climate changes, but in addition, at least 23 periods of climatic warming and cooling have occurred in the past 500 years. Each period of warming or cooling lasted about 25-30 years (average 27 years). Two cycles of global warming and two of global cooling have occurred during the past century, and the global cooling that has occurred since 1998 is exactly in phase with the long term pattern. Global cooling occurred from 1880 to ~1915; global warming occurred from ~1915 to ~1945; global cooling occurred from ~1945-1977;, global warming occurred from 1977 to 1998; and global cooling has occurred since 1998. All of these global climate changes show exceptionally good correlation with solar variation since the Little Ice Age 400 years ago.
‘Steve Irwin’ Attacks Japanese Whalers
LAST night in The Southern Ocean, anti-whaling campaigners aboard The Steve Irwin rammed the Kaiko Maru from the starboard rear side.
According to the Japanese whalers:
The incident occurred when the Kaiko Maru was undertaking a detour in the ice pack area after completing the day’s research activities. The weather had deteriorated and fog had reduced visibility conditions to about 500m.
The Steve Irwin approached the Kaiko Maru from the starboard rear side and within two minutes the protesters aboard started throwing bottles, approximately 15 bottles of butyric acid.
After the ramming, the Dutch vessel pursued, repeatedly overtook and menacingly turned around the Kaiko Maru for approximately three hours, and thereafter changed course to the east where it disappeared from the Kaiko Maru radar.
I recently critiqued some of the campaigns against whaling, in particular the campaign in Albany, Western Australia, in the late 1970s, in an article* entitled ‘Imposing our preferences on whaling cultures’. In the same article I ask whether the last whaling cultures will survive.
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Photos via the Institute of Cetacean Research, Tokyo
* ‘Imposing our preferences on whaling cultures’ by Jennifer Marohasy, IPA Review, Vol 60/5, November 2008, pgs 39-41. http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1229552555_document_60_5-distro.pdf (after clicking on the link, scroll down to page 39).
Global Warming Since 1958
I know it’s a tough job – but let’s just check the International Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) iconic, widely-quoted conclusion* and parse its meaning:
“Most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.”
How should one interpret this ex cathedra declaration to the faithful?
IPCC helpfully defines ‘very likely’ as ‘90-99% certain’, but they don’t tell us how they reached such well-defined certainty.
What remarkable unanimity!
Just how many and whom did they poll?
IPCC doesn’t define the word ‘most.’ We may assume it means anything between 51 and 99%. Quite a spread.
But a footnote informs us that solar forcing is less than 10% of anthropogenic [0.12/ 1.6 W/m2]; so ‘most’ must be closer to 99% than to 51%.
OK; let’s check out the data since 1958. But we don’t want to rely on contaminated surface data – which IPCC likely used – although they omitted to say so.
Atmospheric data were readily available to the IPCC in the CCSP-SAP-1.1 report (Fig 3a, p.54; convening lead author John Lanzante, NOAA), with independent analyses by Hadley Centre and NOAA that agree well. And further, according to GH models, atmospheric trends should be larger than surface temperature trends.
1958 – 2005: Total warming of +0.5 C (But how much of that is anthropogenic?)
1958 – 1976: Cooling
1976 – 1977: Sudden jump of +0.5 C (Cannot be due to GHG.)
1977 – 1997: No detectable trend
1998 – 1999: El Nino spike
2000 – 2001: No detectable trend
2001 – 2003: Sudden jump of +0.3 C (Cannot be due to GHG.)
2003 – present: No trend, maybe even slight cooling
In conclusion: The IPCC’s ‘most’ is not sustained by observations; the human contribution is very likely only 10% or even less.
By Fred Singer, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, and holds a B.E.E. in Electrical engineering from Ohio State University and an A.M. and PhD in Physics from Princeton University
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*IPCC Synthesis Report, Summary for Policy Makers, November 2007
Photograph of Fred Singer taken in New York by Jennifer Marohasy in March 2008.
This note is from SEPP Science Editorial #17 (December 27, 08), ‘Keeping the IPCC honest’ http://www.sepp.org/
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.