Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for February 2011

More Politics from Ross Garnaut: A Note from Des Moore

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LAST November Ross Garnaut was commissioned, for an unknown fee, to produce an Update of the Review of climate change he completed in 2008. Garnaut is an economist who describes himself as an independent expert but he acts like a believer in a greater role for government and has worked closely with Labor governments. As one commentator put it yesterday, “his work has been a key feature of Labor’s campaign to introduce a carbon trading scheme”. Indeed, his first Update and associated comments present a blatantly political perspective in portraying all developments since the Review as supporting the need for emission reducing action by government and dismissing or ignoring the reality that those developments have clearly heightened the uncertainties about the so-called science and whether there will be any agreed international political action.  

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Gay & Lesbian Lobby Attacking Freedom of Speech

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Two corporations, IBM and the ANZ Bank, are part of a boycott of this blog and my advertising revenue has plummeted.   It was never a lot of money, but it had helped pay the bills.

The boycott is a consequence of an article attacking gay marriage published at On Line Opinion.   I have never published anything on gay marriage, and I am not against the concept, but because advertising for this blog is sold as a block with advertising for On Line Opinion, and because the gay lobby is apparently intolerant of alternative views, I am suffering.

And it is not as though On Line Opinion is running a campaign against gays, lesbians or their right to marry – quite the contrary.  On Line Opinion publishes a diversity of opinions with the aim of promoting Socratic dialogue.  

As Christopher Pearson writes in The Australian today, issues of principles are at stake here concerning freedom of political debate in this country and the character of our civilization.

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The Offending Article:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11268&page=0

Skeptical Lawyer on the Boycott:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2011/02/05/of-secondary-boycotts-free-speech-and-revenue/

Christopher Pearson explains the situation in today’s The Weekend Australian:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/oversensitivity-can-only-compromise-debate/story-e6frg6zo-1226000416817

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Britain’s Forests for Sale

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In Australia the general trend is for governments to lock-up more and more forest often through the conversion of land managed as forest reserve into national park.   The conversion of land into national park is often accompanied by a reduction in the level of active management of the area.

Australia has vast areas of both forest reserve and forest in national parks.    Not so in the United Kingdom where there are only 15 national parks and a relatively small area of state owned forest commission. 

Now, in the UK, the new conservative government is planning to sell-off the state-owned forest commission estate and apparently without placing caveats on how this land is used after its sale.

According to The Guardian’s environment blog late last year:

“We now know, thanks to the junior environment minister Jim Paice’s frank evidence to a recent House of Lords select committee, that the government is considering the sale of not just “some”, or even “substantial”, amounts of woodland as the public was originally led to believe, but of all state-owned English trees across the commission’s 635,000-acre Forestry Commission estate. This includes many royal forests, state-owned ancient woodlands, sites of special scientific interest, heathland, campsites, farms and sporting estates.”

Various campaigns have sprung up and it was recently report that the National Trust is planning to buy much or the forest:

“The initiative, says the trust’s director, Dame Fiona Reynolds, could protect in perpetuity not just large areas of heritage areas such as the Forest of Dean and the New Forest, but other woodland expected to be offered for sale to communities and commercial enterprises in the biggest change in land ownership for more than 80 years.”

What is it that governments in Australia and the UK no longer want a part in forestry – they don’t want to be involved in active land management – perhaps reflecting the popular mood which sees such areas as either wilderness or with commercial potential – but not able to reconcile that they can be a source of income and recreation and wildlife refuges and have historically been successfully managed as such by government forestry services?

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/dec/22/tory-privatisation-all-state-forests 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/28/national-trust-save-english-woodlands

Daintree Intact: A Note from Neil Hewett

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Dear Jennifer,

It was a torrid night, but we survived.  Already exhausted from the preparations, the ensuing challenges of responding to the impacts of Yasi as its devastation was unleashed, has left us utterly humbled and in a presently unrecoverable energy debt.  But the important thing is that we are all healthy and the Daintree Rainforest has been remodelled on the outside and remains mostly intact on the inside.

The kids slept through the bulk of the maelstrom, bedded down in their customised refuges, beneath shelves in the purpose-built stronghold of the pantry.  They are now engaged in the novelty of weaving and carving from the inexhaustible supply of fallen forest products and occasionally delighting in the discovery of previously unfamiliar insects.

Please excuse the brevity of this message, but I am sure you appreciate the demands for our attention.  We will keep our friends and family informed of the effects on wildlife and the regeneration of forest in future weeks.

Thank you for your expressions of concern and best wishes.  These came from all over the world.  Coming after 2010, the wettest year in the Daintree Rainforest in recorded history, Australia’s largest cyclone, Yasi has brought world attention to Tropical North Queensland. Looking for remote Python developers ? Contact us.

Neil, Angie, Prue and the rainforest rascals, Tulli, Taiga & Tkoda.
 
http://www.ccwild.com/blog/?p=3605&utm_source=MailingList&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Cyclone+Yasi

A Note on the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation

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According to American climatologist, Judith Curry, there are plenty of things to be skeptical about when it comes to Anthropogenic Global Warming, but the basic physics of gaseous infrared radiative transfer is not one of them.

Dr Curry, is the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the co-author of ‘Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans’ (1999), and was speaking out against claims in a book ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory’. 

There has been some discussion of radiative transfer theory at this blog mostly via notes I have posted from Alan Siddons, Holden, Massachusetts, who is a chapter author in the book and is very skeptical about the basic physics of radiative transfer as applied by mainstream climate scientists and in the IPCC reports.  

I was recently alerted to a blog post Dr Curry has started, ostensibly to discuss this physics and its application to global warming theory.   It seems to have stirred up interest again in this issue. 

An occasional commentator at this blog, known as Cementafriend, is also skeptical, in particular about how the Stefan-Boltzmann equation is applied by the climate scientists. 
Following is a note from Cementafriend to resurrect the issue here:

Is the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation used correctly

D Kern in the text book “Process Heat Transfer” states “Radiant energy is believed to originate within molecules of the radiating body, atoms of such molecules vibrating in simple harmonic motion as linear oscillators. The emission of radiant energy is believed to represent a decrease in the amplitudes of the vibrations within the molecules, while an absorption of energy represents an increase.”

But from where does the Stefan-Boltzmann equation come?

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