“Right now the only certain way to save lives is by calling off this misguided war on climate change. If and when climate change promises to claim more casualties than poverty and starvation, the world will begin heeding their calls. If, however, these climate-change casualties don’t materialize, there would have been no need to act in the first place. Either way, the world has far more immediate and scarier problems than climate change to address right now.” Shikha Dalmia, Forbes, 15 July 2009
Archives for July 2009
No Warming Until Maybe 2020
OK. It is not pleasant to call someone a ‘warmaholic’.
I guess it does suggest a dependency.
I always thought of the blog RealClimate as dependent on their being global warming. But in a recent article they are suggesting there may be no more warming until 2020. I reckon if you can live without something for 11 years it suggests a lack of dependency.
But they are denying there is cooling.
A reader, Robert Ellison, has suggested it is OK to leave the question of whether this is a longer term trend – for the moment. But, he insists, “The real point is that 0.08 degrees per decade (and declining sensitivity to greenhouse gases) is not sufficient to warrant restricting the economic aspirations of billions of people.”
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Notes and Links
Warming, interrupted: Much ado about natural variability
By Kyle Swanson – University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~kswanson/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf
discussed at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/
New Book from Expert ‘Climate Sceptic’
Climatologist Dr Garth Paltridge has finally had enough of the hysteria, hype and witchhunting that’s fed the great global warming scare. Out today is his new book, The Climate Caper. Read more at Andrew Bolt’s blog. Order a copy from Connor Court.
Hong Kong Cleans Up It’s Environment
ACCORDING to many commentators, one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century is the protection and conservation of the environment. It’s a mainstream issue and not just in places like Australia. Indeed even the government of Hong Kong is now making environmental sustainability a key objective which it intends to integrate with economic and social objectives.
And according to recent Australian government advice there are opportunities for Australian businesses in pollution prevention and control technologies as the country seeks to address air and water pollution. Current major suppliers of environmental equipment are apparently from the USA, Japan, mainland China and the UK.
Actions Don’t Accord with Intensions
Young people don’t need to be persuaded of the climate crisis. Poll any group of people, young or old, and a majority will talk of their passion to live in a greener world. But ask that same group how much they drive, or fly, or how many children they intend to have and you’ll be amazed. It simply doesn’t add up. Read more here.
A Climate Change Paradox (Part 2)
AUSTRALIA’S Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, recently suggested that most of the global warming since 1960, about 85 percent, has happened in the oceans and that change in ocean heat content is thus the most appropriate measure of global warming.
In my previous post, working from first principles, I determined a discrepancy of 9:1 in the rate of warming from Australian government data relative to IPCC findings. In reviewing these calculations I now realise I made a significant error. I had wrongly assumed that the claimed positive feedback from water vapour was proportional to the carbon dioxide concentration. This is not correct, the claimed positive feedback is proportional to the temperature rise and that change does make a difference to the calculations and needs to be corrected. The revised calculations still show a paradox although only about 3:1.
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.