Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for November 2011

Kyoto Crumbles

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THERE is only one global accord that specifies curbs in greenhouse gas emissions, The Kyoto Protocol. It’s named after a town in Japan and it was the culmination of a process launched with the Rio Summit in 1992.

The Kyoto Protocol was used to lambaste John Howard for not ratifying it when he was Australian Prime Minister and ratifying Kyoto made something of a hero of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Now it appears Canada is on the verge of announcing its formal withdraw from Kyoto. This is a big symbolic deal. Canada would be the first country to abandon the agreement after ratifying it.

Under the agreement Canada agreed to reduce greenhouse emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Canada cannot meet this commitment with emissions having continued to rise. By officially withdrawing from Kyoto Canada can apparently avoid paying the associated penalty for failing in its quest.

Not surprisingly various activists including the head of the international climate strategy for WWF, Tasneem Essop, are crying foul. Canada may be lambasted, but they will be setting a good example, an example Australia should follow.

And the UN climate conference opened yesterday in Durban. When are they going to start doing these things by Skype?

Bushfires are Getting Worse

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“IT is too late to leave, you need to take shelter in your home and actively defend it.”

That’s part of a government warning issued today to residents in the Shire of Augusta-Margaret River in south western Western Australia. Twenty homes have already been lost.

Roger Underwood, Chairman of The Bushfire Inc, an organization devoted to improving the standard of bushfire management in Australia, has been warning of potential disaster for many years. At the organisation’s website, Underwood explains:

“For a 25 year period after the 1961 Dwellingup fire there was a comprehensive fuel reduction program in WA forests that gave us a very high level of protection from serious bushfires. Up until about 1985 the majority of the jarrah forest, for example, was burned by low intensity fires every 5-7 years to keep fuel loads down. After that time, the fuel reduction burning program fell away badly and the area of bushfires began to rise. Now, about half the forest area will support an uncontrollable crown fire – a tragic situation.

“There is a similar situation on private land in the South West of the State. For about 25 years the Bush Fires Board and volunteer brigades carried out a vigorous fuel management program, which maintained low fuel loads in rural areas. When the functions of the Bush Fires Board were taken over by FESA, this program also fell away, as FESA’s prime focus is fire suppression, not fuel management.”

The Australian landscapes needs to be actively managed to keep it safe and biologically diverse. This reality is not understood by many of those currently responsible for the development and implementation of land management policy, not just in Western Australia, but across Australia. This reflects a broader myth within the Australia community that when people are excluded from landscapes they will revert to a natural state, a natural order. But none exists.

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http://bushfirefront.com.au/

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/11966054/fierce-bushfire-razes-homes-near-margaret-river/

Reform or Abandon the IPCC

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A leading environmental economist has called upon governments to either radically reform or abandon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In his report ‘What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for Radical Reform’ published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada) reviews the IPCC’s own procedures in detail and highlights a number of serious flaws and weaknesses.

McKitrick’s report shows that, under current procedures:

1. The IPCC’s managing bureau unilaterally selects Lead Authors, giving it direct influence on the content of reports;

2. IPCC Lead Authors are frequently asked to review their own work and that of their critics, placing them in a conflict of interest;

3. The IPCC peer review procedures allow Lead Authors to overrule reviewers, and to rewrite the text after the close of peer review, rendering it ineffective at preventing bias;

4. Government review and oversight through the plenary panel is cursory at best, with the vast majority of member governments failing to take any active role.

McKitrick presents a number of case studies that illustrate how these various procedural flaws have had material effects on key sections of past reports.

McKitrick proposes a set of rule changes that would aim to make IPCC editorial procedures as rigorous as those of a standard academic journal. Even this modest target would require substantial changes.

Read more here: http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/mckitrick-ipcc_reforms.pdf

Climategate II

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TWO years after Climategate – the scandal caused by the leaking of over one thousand emails detailing correspondence between leading climate scientists exposing conspiracy and collusion including how to stack review committees, exaggerate warming trends, and avoid the disclosure of sensitive information – another batch of emails have been leaked, again from the University of East Anglia and again from the infamous Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth and the hapless Keith Briffa.

According to bloggers and columnists who’ve been up earlier than me and who have already start reading the file: what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism.

The new leaked file of emails, dubbed FOIA 2011, is apparently introduced with comment from the Whistleblower:

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Every day nearly 16,000 children die from hunger and related causes. One dollar can save a life — the opposite must also be true. Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels. Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.”

James Delingpole, breaking new for the UK Telegraph, concurs:

“If you’re going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you’re going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you’re going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Download the emails here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37

Wind farms are useless, says Duke of Edinburgh

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OLD style windmills dot the Australian rural landscape. They were once critical for pump watering from bores, creeks and dams to tanks to water sheep and cattle.

Wind turbines are a variation on the old theme. There are apparently 3,421 wind turbines in the UK mostly build for electricity generation; two-thirds of these are owned by foreign companies that apparently make most of their money from government subsidies generated by the wind farms.

The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Phillip, apparently disapproves of them.

That’s according to a private conversation he had with Esbjorn Wilmar, the managing director of a leading wind farm company.

Buckingham Palace won’t deny or confirm the conversation. Curious that Mr Wilmar was so keen to pass on the Duke’s views given the Duke is so critical of his business.

Read more at the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-philip/8901985/Wind-farms-are-useless-says-Prince-Philip.html

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Wind farms are useless, says Duke of Edinburgh By Jonathan Wynne-Jones

Global Temperature Update to October 2011

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Dear all. Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter (ca. 1.4 MB) with various meteorological information updated to October 2011:

http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_October_2011.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.

Previous (since March 2009) issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography

Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Box 1042 Blindern
N-0316 Oslo, Norway