Great friendship despite great difference…
Archives for June 2013
Taxing Air: Facts & Fallacies about Climate Change
IT’S focused on Australia, popular misconceptions about the environment, history, climate and there is more, it’s chock full of cartoons! I’m referring to a new book by scientist Bob Carter [1] and cartoonist John Spooner entitled Taxing Air: Facts & Fallacies about Climate Change. 
Some of the big issues address:
Just 8,000 years ago, there was virtually no summer sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Sea-level rise is natural, and declining in rate.
Australian rainfall has not decreased over the last 100 years.
A previous Australian drought lasted 69 years.
By catchment management, the Murray-Darling Basin now contains almost 3 times as much water as it held naturally.
Global air temperature has not increased for the last 16 years, despite an 8% increase in CO2.
Global ocean temperature is also steady or cooling slightly.
Australian territory absorbs up to 20 times the amount of CO2 that we emit.
If you order your copy this week it will be a signed copy.
For more information visit http://www.taxingair.com
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[1] Bob Carter is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers in professional scientific journals. The great majority of these concern interpretations of ancient environments, including paleo-climatic studies. Link to full of list of publications here… http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_4.htm
Guessing versus Calculating a Global Mean Temperature
“THE greatest difficulty facing the promoters of the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause dangerous global warming is the inconvenient truth that it is impossible to measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface by any known technology. Without this information it is not possible to claim global warming” writes Vincent Gray in his most recent ‘Truth Newsletter’.
The newsletter continues with an explanation of how a mean global surface temperature anomaly was calculated, and then switches to compare output from General Circulation Models (GCMs) with an all together different method of calculating a global mean temperature using microwave sounders…
“In order to fake this claim the Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record
(MGSTAR) was fabricated from temperature measurements made at meteorological weather
stations.
[Read more…] about Guessing versus Calculating a Global Mean Temperature
Fishing Lobby Trumps Murray Cod Recovery (The Native Fish Strategy for the Murray Darling Ten Years On: Part 3)
THE key recommendation in the Native Fish Strategy for the Murray Darling Basin 2003-2013 – a document developed by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, (MDBC) and adopted by the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) – was the need to address the issue of cold water pollution in particular from the Hume dam.
The strategy, published ten years ago, includes comment that cold-water pollution abatement is a “clearly definable, tangible, cost-effective intervention” that can be completed for the major storages in the Murray Darling Basin within ten years, through a combination of engineering and operating changes. The strategy was to run from 2003 to 2013 with the objective of returning native fish to 60 per cent of their pre-European levels.
Hume Dam, like most of the dams throughout the Murray Darling, have outlets for irrigation positioned at depth, so water release occurs as a jet of cold water. Releases are typically made in spring and this is the same time Murray cod and other native fish like to spawn. 
Open Thread
Photograph of the Black-headed gull taken in Lymington, England about a month ago.
Undemocratic Politics Again Determines Land Use in Tasmania: An Update
A DECISION made in Cambodia this month by the United Nation’s World Heritage committee could add 172,000 hectares of forest to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Federal Minister for the Environment Tony Burke was seeking to have the deal sealed without proper scrutiny, in particular by using a loophole in the UN guidelines to label it as a “minor” modification. But this plan to rush through the extension in support of the Tasmanian forest peace deal hit a major hurdle when a key UN adviser, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) recently rejected the proposal as ‘minor’ and recommended that the nomination be ‘referred back’ to Australia to enable full and proper consultation.
The draft decision is at: http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2013/whc13-37com-8B-Add-en.pdf
But what the final outcome will be is unclear. It is understood that the Australian government and the environmental NGO’s will be sending delegations to lobby individual committee members to overturn the recommendation to ‘refer back’ the nomination.
[Read more…] about Undemocratic Politics Again Determines Land Use in Tasmania: An Update
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.