Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for December 2008

Best [Australian] Blogs of 2008

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Each year On Line Opinion and Club Troppo collaborate to publish a Best Blogs feature in January, which features the best blog pieces from the previous year selected from reader nominations.

This year we are doing it again.

What was the best blog piece that you read in 2008? It can even be one you have written yourself – so don’t be shy.

Let us know, by casting your votes here http://polling.nationalforum.com.au/index.php?sid=54429&lang=en

We will take look at your votes, weigh them up with our expert panel, and get the right to republish as many of them as we can in On Line Opinion over the January period. While you’re thinking, you might like to check out last year’s Best Blogs feature http://onlineopinion.com.au/feature.asp?year=2008&month=1

The Cult of Celebrity and Tasmanian Forestry

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THE public hysteria surrounding the proposed Tasmanian pulpmill shows that the logging of native forests remains one of Australia’s hottest environmental topics. This is surprising given that sustainable wood production is now permitted within just a net 6 per cent portion of the nation’s public forests, it is highly regulated, and it is regarded as among the best managed in the world. As an environmental threat, the government’s Australia State of the Forests Report, regards logging as insignificant.

Despite this, it has become politically incorrect to support native hardwood production as a sensible and responsible use of a naturally renewable resource. Those who do so are routinely vilified as I was last week when a letter I had published in The Age newspaper drew responses that scorned me as an “industry apologist trying to keep us in the dark ages” and a “spin doctor” who “relies on the public being fools”.

In the past, I have also been described as a “mouthpiece for the logging industry” or the “pro-logging lobby”, which is apparently “blind to the bigger picture of global crisis”. I have been called a “forest raper” and a “pro-logging, anti-life person”. Others believe I am “motivated by short term greed” and “headed towards my own demise”. I am apparently one of those “people who can chop, hunt, maim, kill, exploit, dominate and destroy in the name of progress and jobs” and I have been likened to “the captain of the Titanic refusing to believe that your enterprise is fatally flawed”.

[Read more…] about The Cult of Celebrity and Tasmanian Forestry

Update: Climate Conference New York 2009

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“Confirmed speakers for Heartland’s climate-change conference makes clear, it is Gore whose eyes are shut to reality. Among the “climate deniers” lined up to speak are Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT; the University of Alabama’s Roy W. Spencer, a pioneer in the monitoring of global temperatures by satellite; Stephen McIntyre, primary author of the influential Climate Audit blog; and meteorologist John Coleman, who founded the Weather Channel in 1982.”  Read more here.

New Trails and Academia

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“Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies.  The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating.  To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness.” S. Warren Carey (Australian geologist) via Fred Singer.

Summary of 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season

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EVER since Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ there has been a fear that every year will bring more destructive cyclones because of global warming. 

The 2008 hurricane season for the Atlantic officially ended on November 30 and Phillip Klotzbach and William Gray have already published their 50 plus-page report on the season.

They explain that it was an active and destructive season with an early start followed by five major hurricanes. 

They conclude that the Atlantic has seen a very large increase in major hurricanes during the last 14-year period as a result of the multi-decadal increase in the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation and that this is not directly related to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide or global sea surface temperatures.  

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Summary of 2008 Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Activity and Verification of Author’s Seasonal and Monthly Forecasts.  Phillip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, November 2008. http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2008/nov2008/nov2008.pdf