Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for October 2020

Half the Corals Dead – But Not in Real Life

By

The claim that half the corals of the Great Barrier Reef are dead is based on a new method using ‘proxies’ (not a direct measure of coral cover), applied to badly cyclone damaged reefs, just after a major coral bleaching event – from which the corals have since recovered.

It has been reported across the world yet again, that the reef is ruin, but none of the publications reporting its demise have bothered to actually send journalists to go and look. They trust the scientists and the journal. Yet Terry Hughes, one of the authors of the new article has been shown time and again to just make stuff up when it comes to the health of individual coral reefs. His research centre (ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies) and the journal that published the most recent article claiming half the coral are dead (London’s Royal Society) have been mired in controversy for years.

Across the western world it has been reported that the Great Barrier Reef is half dead.
____________________________

One of the locations mentioned in the new study is in the far northern section, at North Direction Island. The coral reefs around this small, uninhabited steep granite island have been through the eye of some of the most destructive category 4 and 5 cyclones — Ita in 2014 and Nathan in 2015 — and they were at the centre of the coral bleaching event in the summer of 2016. But the coral reefs there have since recovered.

I dived nearby reefs for a week earlier this year. I went to the Ribbon reefs that follow the edge of Australia’s continental shelf in the far north east to find, and film, coral bleaching.

It is claimed the Ribbon reefs are amongst the worst affected – 60% dead from bleaching. Bleaching is when corals turn white as a result of warmer water temperatures, which climate scientists say is being caused by global warming.

But I couldn’t find any significant bleaching. I mostly found jewelled curtains of coral, appearing to cascade down underwater cliff faces. So colourful, so beautiful, all in crystal clear and warm waters with curious clownfish and a giant potato cod.

The Ribbon reefs represent the most north eastern edge of Australia’s continental shelf. The cliff faces drop 2,000 metres to the sea floor. This photograph was taken at a dive site known as Crackerjack in January 2020. The photograph at the very top of this blog post (with Shirley Wu) was taken at the same dive sites, also in January 2020.

I found the 2,000-year old coral colony known as The Monolith. This is perhaps the largest colony of Pavona clavus coral in the world. I was told by the boat skipper that The Monolith had been badly bleached in 2016. It had fully recovered when I was filmed swimming over it in January 2020. I was filmed by Emmy award winning underwater cinematographer Clint Hempsall.

A study published by Reef Check Australia, undertaken between 2001 to 2014 – where citizen scientists followed an agreed and straightforward methodology at 77 sites on 22 reefs – concluded that 43 sites showed no net change in hard coral cover, 23 sites showed an increase by more than 10 per cent (10–41 per cent, net change), and 17 sites showed a decrease by more than 10 per cent (10–63 per cent, net change). This study was undertaken just before the 2016 bleaching event.

While the new article by the James Cook University scientists, claims both the incident of coral bleaching and cyclones is increasing, there is actually no evidence to support either contention.

The available data (1971 to 2017) indicates there has actually been a decrease in both the number and severity of cyclones in the Australian region.

The official data from the Bureau shows neither an increase in the number or severity of tropical cyclones.

Coral bleaching events tend to be cyclical and coincide with periods of exceptionally low sea levels. The dramatic falls in sea level across the western Pacific Ocean in 2016 are charted on page 267 (chapter 17) of a book I edited, ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020′.

The dramatic falls in sea level were associated with an El Nino event. These have been documented at the Great Barrier Reef back 3,000 years by Helen McGregor at Wollongong University. I’m specifically thinking of her paper entitled ‘Coral micro atoll reconstructions of El Nino-Southern Oscillation: New windows on seasonal and inter annual processes’, which was published in the journal ‘Past Global Changes’ (volume 21) in 2013.

I was born and bred in northern Australia. The Great Barrier Reef is a second home, and for me the most awe-inspiring natural environment on Earth.

My mother lived and worked on Heron Island at the Great Barrier Reef in 1955. That was the same year the young Bob Endean established the University of Queensland Heron Island Research Station. He went on to become a famous marine biologist, and instrumental in the formation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) in 1975. According to Endean’s research the Great Barrier Reef was almost always just about to be destroyed by crown-of-thorn starfish.

There is a photograph of my mother, then Joan Edith Pearce, standing knee deep surrounded by Porites coral micro atolls that are stunted and bleached. But Mum, who turns 90 next March, said there was no talk of bleaching back then, everyone was fearful of the starfish.

It is the case that back then and until recently, coral calcification rates were calculated based on coring of the large Porites corals. By dissecting micro-atolls — the type shown in the picture of my mother at Heron Island back in 1955 — it is possible to understand that sea level has been a constraint to coral growth at the Great Barrier reef for at least this long: at least 3,000 years. There is no evidence of overall sea level rise, there is evidence that sea levels have fallen 1.5 metre since the Holocene High Stand.

Corals are animals, closely related to jelly fish, but they differ in having a limestone skeleton. This is hard-stuff, calcium carbonate, and it can persist in the environment and provide an indication of changes in sea level, and also the growth rates of corals, over thousands of years.

There are well established techniques for coring the Porites corals, and then measuring growth rates. But since 2005 the Australian Institute of Marine Science has stopped using this technique to measure how well corals are growing at the Great Barrier Reef. The few studies still using the old technique suggest that as would be expected, as water temperatures have increased marginally, coral growth rates have also increased.

But rather than admit this fact that runs contrary to the zeitgeist, leading research institutions have moved from such direct measures to new and complicated ‘proxies’ – they thus have more flexibility in what they ‘find’ because the measurement is no-longer something that actually represents coral growth rates or coral cover. A proxy vote, for examples, is something delegated. This gives the researchers at James Cook University the potential to generate what might be considered policy-based evidence.

Real science is about actual measurements of real phenomena, and real world observations.

A conclusion in the media reporting of the most recent research is that “there is no time to lose, we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions”. Another assumption, perhaps inadvertently created with bias and agenda. Though, this is not even written into the article. Rather it is reported in the media associated with the article just published by London’s Royal Society. It is assumed. It is also assumed that the corals at North Direction island never recovered from the cyclones and bleaching – yet they have recovered! The coral reefs across this region are magnificent right now, and this can be verified by diving them with one’s eyes wide open.

The Great Barrier Reef is resilient, and individual reefs, including the reefs at North Direction Island, do recover. As I explain in my new short documentary film, the huge colony of Pavona clavus known as The Monolith, that stretches about 30 metres up the limestone ridge at Ribbon Reef No 10, has already endured countless cyclones and bleaching events – it is a survivor.

The Great Barrier Reef as one ecosystem, comprises nearly 3,000 individual reefs stretching for 2,000 kilometres. It is still visible from outer space.

Damaged areas can always be found somewhere because a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today, may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow.

If we are to accurately measure coral cover, and coral growth rates, then the cycles need to be considered. The methodology used to assess the health of the Great Barrier Reef should be based on direct measures (not proxies), it should be over a reasonable time span understanding that there are regular bleaching events every 18.6 years corresponding with the lunar declination cycle, and it should include a large number of coral reefs.

When we are able to move beyond ‘postmodern science’, only then will what be written in the most prestigious journals correspond with what I see in the real world.

Oh, how I love jumping off boats and going under the water at the Great Barrier Reef where there are still colourful corals and such curious fish.

It is a pity that the make believe in the science journals creates so much fear and anxiety about something that is still so beautiful and magical.

So I took my drone (Skido), and here you can see an aerial looking down onto the reef/bommie that features at the very top of this blog post with Shirley swimming. It is difficult to actually see any corals unless you jump in, and go under the water. Yet the survey back in 2016 by Terry Hughes that first reported extensive coral bleaching was from 300 metres up and out a plane window. The drone shot is from perhaps at most 40 metres altitude.

____
*The new article claiming half the corals are dead is:
Dietzel A, Bode M, Connolly SR, Hughes TP. 2020 Long-term shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the Great Barrier Reef. Proc. R. Soc. B 287: 20201432. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1432

Penguins, Rowan Dean and Selling Books

By

Saturday night, I was eating chocolates at Catherine’s (remember my friend who tutors kids in maths), when Rowan phoned. Not any Rowan. The Rowan Dean from Sky Television. He was working late.

We had just been talking about him at dinner, because I was meant to be on his Sky TV ‘Outsiders’ program the next morning, and Emma had asked what I would be talking about. I had said I had no idea, pour me another red wine.

Anyway, Rowan was phoning to clarify that I would be talking about the new book, “But which chapters specifically?” he asked. Then, before I could answer, he suggested that Sunday morning his audience didn’t necessary like anything too technical, “Not too much detail”, he suggested.

“What about we start with the last chapter then?” I suggested.

The book has a long introduction, in which I suggest everyone should perhaps read the last chapter first because it includes an important warning for those who might seek the truth about climate change.

Scott Hargreaves explains in this chapter (chapter 20), with reference to Dante’s epic poem ‘Inferno’, if you search fearless for the truth, you may find yourself drawn down into the nine circles of hell. And it can be such a lonely journey. You may be ostracised. You may end-up losing your job, as happened to Peter Ridd for seeking the truth about coral calcification rates.

In chapter 20, Scott categorises various high-profile sceptics based on how far they have fallen. Yes. Fallen.

He places Bjorn Lomborg, for example, in Dante’s second circle of hell. He places Peter Ridd in circle number 6, and me in circle 8.

I do remember having a conversation with Bjorn some years ago. Bjorn had said once you start questioning the official statistics Jen, well you are potentially getting into the realm of the conspiracy theory – you are perhaps going too far to be credible.

I remember replying, but I have to go where-ever the the evidence takes me.

There is the Andrew Breitbart quote, “Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about what they call you.”

On page 14, in the introduction to the new book, I quote Thomas Huxley (the 19th Century biologist and colleague of Charles Darwin), he wrote:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

As it turned out, Sunday morning on ‘Outsiders’, we ended-up talking about other things entirely. Chapter 20 never got a mention.

Never mind, and never mind that trying to hotspot from my phone, got me an unstable internet connection. We still sold so many books after the program on Sunday. So much thanks to Rowan Dean for holding up the book so often!

Amongst other things, on Sunday morning I did briefly mention penguins. There is a whole chapter about counting emperor penguins in the book. That is actually the title of chapter 3: ‘Counting Emperor Penguins’.

It’s by Jim Steele and it explains how difficult it can be working out population numbers when whole colonies move, and individuals relocate because they are perhaps tired of wrestling with scientists!

It is the case that penguin monitoring once involved tagging, with scientists wrestling penguins to the ground in Antarctica. So, some of the penguins moved. The scientists recorded them as dying from climate change. They didn’t die, they moved!

There is more information about wrestling penguins in the book.

***

The picture at the top of this blog post is of two Emperor penguins via Shutterstock.

Bushfires, Concepts of Wilderness, and a New Book

By

Journalist Clarissa Bye from the Daily Telegraph has done a really good job of summarizing my concerns and recommendations for better bushfire management across Australia. The article entitled ‘Burning Question on Fires and Climate Link’ has been republished in so many of the News Ltd regional papers including The Frazer Coast Chronicle and The Byron Shire News and is based on Chapter 16 in my new book, ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020’. Clarissa writes:

Dr Marohasy says insufficient hazard reduction played a part in the fuel load of the recent bushfires, and that neglecting fire management in eucalypt forests ¬simply made them “more prone to severe fires that will eventually destroy them”.

But she argues we need to return to a better understanding of traditional Aboriginal burning methods, build support for hazard reduction and develop a consistent methodology for determining fire severity.

“A focus on hazard reduction burning to keep landscapes generally more open and thus safer for people and wildlife, would be more useful than blaming climate change – at least until there is better quality assurance of actual temperature measurements,” Dr Marohasy said.

I do spend some time in chapter 16 explaining that Eucalyptus forests are not the same as rainforests and that which type of forest we end-up with will depend on how the landscape is managed – or not.

Much of Australia was open woodland at the time of European settlement and actively managed by the First Australians (Aborigines) to keep it that way. Excluding fire can help such forests transition to rainforest, but in the process the forests are more vulnerable to incineration at least until there is a proper closed-overcanopy.

So, there is actually a need for active management of the landscape to ensure fire suppression within and around these forests until a proper rainforest has established. So it is important to have firebreaks and hazard reduction burning in areas surrounding rainforests.

There is generally a very poor understanding within the dominant white Australian culture of the extent to which natural landscapes are dynamic. Indeed, the type of vegetation at any one time will depend not only on the soil type and rainfall but also on the historical fire management regime.

The Australian Aboriginal culture has a completely different, and more realistic and practical notion of land management. Indeed there is an aboriginal saying that begins: Wilderness is a land without custodians.

The article by Clarissa begins:

The bushfires that swept through Australia last summer were repeatedly des¬cribed as “unprecedented” and blamed on climate change, but a new book has rejected those claims, saying the statistics prove otherwise.

Climate Change: The Facts 2020 examines records on rainfall, hectares burnt, temperatures and the ecology of eucalypt forests, and argues that fires just as ferocious and extensive have burned in Australia since at least 1851.

In February, Paris Climate Agreement talks leader Christina Figueres described Australia’s summer bushfires as the “worst disaster that has ever hit the planet”.

But senior research fellow at the Institute of Public ¬Affairs Jennifer Marohasy, who edited the book and wrote the chapter on bushfires, says the book’s contributors assert that climate is subject to cycles, and the current situation is “not ¬unusual” or “catastrophic”.

An estimated 20 million hectares of land mass may have burned last summer.

“This is an extraordinarily vast area considering much of it was in the southeast,” Dr Marohasy said. “A similarly vast area of 21 million hectares was lost to unplanned fires as recently as 2012-13. “However, this is not the largest area burned by uncontrolled fires. In 1974-75, 117 million hectares burned.”
Only three people died in the 1974-75 fires, which burned mostly in uninhabited parts of Central Australia…

On claims Australia is drier than ever, Dr Marohasy said the wettest summer since 1990 was as recent as 2010-11.

“If anything, these official statistics suggest it is getting wetter, rainfall statistics for the entire Australian continent, available for download from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, also indicate that more recent years have been wetter, especially the past 50 years,” she said.

Dr Marohasy acknowledges the fires were utterly devastating…
The book has chapters by biologists, atmospheric physicists, meteorologists and a volcanologist who “conclude that there is nothing unusual about the current rate or magnitude of climate change,” she said. Ends of article by Clarissa

The official statistics for the entire Australian continent do not show declining rainfall.

My new book was only available through commercial booksellers in Australia from yesterday, but in the few days preceding this we sold 600 copies through the IPA website!

The book is published by Australian Scholarly Publishers (ASP). The book is just now being shipped to the international distributor – to both their US and UK branches. Then they will be available for Amazon and BookDepository to make available for sale on their sites. This is apparently the fastest way for us to get make the books available to the international markets with cheaper shipping, but it will still take about 8-10 weeks from departure in Australia to be ready for sale on these sites.

In the meantime, the climatechangethefacts.org.au website works for domestic and also international purchases.

In his testimony to the recent Royal Commission on the devastating bushfires Andrew Johnson, the head of The Australian Bureau claimed rainfall was in decline. The data does not support this contention. When Josh Frydenberg was the Minister responsible for the Bureau he asked Andrew Johnson to meet with me. I tried to set-up several meetings, but he kept cancelling on me.
Whichever way you consider the rainfall data, including by season, there is no decline.

There are no equivalent statistics for bushfires. As I explain in chapter 16 (page 226) of the new book: “There is no consistent Australia-wide methodology for determining the severity of fires, or even the amount of forest burned by either wildfires or through prescribed burning each summer.”

Asking the Non-Consensual Questions, My New Book on Climate Change

By

He is calling it the ‘thinking sceptics’ guide to climate change. The article is by journalist Graham Lloyd in The Weekend Australian. It is about my new book, Climate Change: The Facts 2020 (CCTF2020).

Graham Lloyd has read the book – all 20 chapters – and he understands the importance of the three chapters by the atmospheric physicists Richard Lindzen, Henrik Svensmark and Peter Ridd. Graham understands that they provide a new perspective on established research that has been difficult for the mainstream climate change establishment to understand, let alone accept.

Graham Lloyd, he understands that Peter Ridd’s important chapter in CCTF2020 builds on the pioneering work of Joanne Simpson, and that Richard Lindzen destroyed the hard core of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) theory twenty years ago; that was in Lindzen’s seminal paper on the relationship between high altitude cirrus cloud cover and carbon dioxide. There is no role for carbon dioxide in Henrick Svensmark’s theory of how the climate changes (chapter 10), and Svensmark, like Lindzen, is obsessed with clouds.

In CCTF2020 Richard Lindzen writes about cirrus clouds, Henrik Svensmark about cumulus clouds, and the chapter by Peter Ridd is all about my favourite clouds which are cumulonimbus. Peter Ridd and I are both from tropical Australia and we love the drama of watching thunderstorms.

I’ve been saying for so long now that it is not good enough to just disprove CAGW theory, we need to have an alternative theory. I’m hoping that CCTF2020 is the beginning of some public discussion about this. Geoffrey Duffy’s chapter on water vapour (chapter 11) is also important in terms of understanding the basics of weather and climate on planet Earth.

The history of science suggests that new theories are usually supported by new tools. (Galileo and Kepler, for example, were obsessed with telescopes.)

I’ve no doubt that one day, climate models based on artificial intelligence (AI) will replace simulation modelling for weather and climate forecasting. These AI models may look something like the models that John Abbot describes in chapters 9 and 14 of CCTF2020.

Such models may be first made operational by Indonesian meteorologists working at Chinese universities who have taken forward the ideas pioneered by John Abbot and myself. The head of the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology, Rita Karnawati, understands that weather and climate can be accurately forecast. She is a fan of my work and has a copy of the last book in the CCTF series, published in 2017.

Rita Karnawati thinks about climate in terms of cycles that can be described mathematically. If the Indonesians and Chinese develop this capability more generally before we do in the West, it will give them a big military advantage. She invited me to Indonesia back in 2018-2019 to train her best and brightest in AI.

Me with Indonesian meteorologists and Professor Rita Karnawati (front in white hijab) in Bandung in 2018.

As I explain in the introduction to CCTF2020, it was British meteorologist James Stagg’s capacity to forecast the lull in stormy weather in early June 1944 that gave the allies a huge military advantage in World War II. My mother still remembers D-Day, she was living in London through the war. She doesn’t remember that there was a lull in the storm, but rather waking up to the drone of aircraft overhead. Mum will be ninety next March.

James Stagg, the British meteorologist who advised the supreme commander of the allied forces Dwight D. Eisenhower, understood not only weather fronts, but also lunar cycles. He thought in terms of mathematics and tides – not just ocean tides, but atmospheric tides. And the weather station at Blacksod Point in the far west of Ireland accurately recorded and reported weather statistics to him.

I met with Oscar Alves, who heads the team at the Australian Bureau that is meant to be developing methods for seasonal rainfall prediction. That was back in August 2011, when I was so excited about the potential to forecast monthly rainfall using AI.

Oscar Alves told me that accurate monthly rainfall forecasting is essentially impossible, and that he wasn’t interested in AI because it would require him to learn something new. We really are a civilization in decline in the West, and our government bureaucracies promote meteorologists based on their attachment to carbon dioxide rather than their enthusiasm for accurate and skilful weather and climate forecasts. This is not the situation at all in countries like Indonesia and China where they know that carbon dioxide is mostly irrelevant.

Oscar Alves’s boss, Andrew Johnson, the current head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, seems to understand very little about mathematics or meteorology. At the recent Royal Commission into bushfires where Andrew Johnson was an expert witness, he commented that parts of Australia had experienced a rapid decline in rainfall. We might assume he was referring to the south-east of Australia because vast areas of Eucalyptus forest burnt in the south-east this last summer. Yet if we consider the official statistics from his own office, from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, for this region, we see that annual rainfall is variable and that while the 1950s and 1970s were wetter than recent years – there is no evidence of long-term decline in rainfall. In fact, whichever way the statistics are scrutinised, there is no evidence for a decline in rainfall – in the south-east of Australia, for the summer period, or even considering the data for all of Australia for all months since 1900. This is explained by me in chapter 15, that is about the history of bushfires in Australia since 1851.

In his testimony to the recent Royal Commission on the devastating bushfires Andrew Johnson, the head of The Australian Bureau claimed rainfall was in decline. The data does not support this contention. When Josh Frydenberg was the Minister responsible for the Bureau he asked Andrew Johnson to meet with me. I tried to set-up several meetings with Andrew Johnson, but he was always unavailable.

My best friend from school, Catherine, has spent her entire career teaching kids mathematics. She was staying with me here in Noosa recently and it got me thinking about the importance of not just publishing graphs, but helping people understand them.

If you have kids and grandkids it is important that you take on the responsibility of teaching mathematical literacy, and Catherine provides some tips in my last blog post.

We can’t give up on any of this. We need more children that can think critically, and scientists at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that can-do maths and read graphs. Someone must take this up as their mission, to put a broom through the current team there that are dangerously incompetent.

I would like to thank John Roskam at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) for conceiving the Climate Change the Facts series and having confidence in me to edit this fourth book in the series. I would like to thank everyone who donated to the book! It meant that I did have the necessary budget to pay John Castle who did such a good job to ensure that all the graphs, and charts, and illustrations, are not only colourful and fun, but also technically accurate.

You can order the book here: https://climatechangethefacts.org.au/

Also, please, if you are in Australia, then go and buy the Weekend Australian newspaper, and/or take out an online subscription then leave a comment at the end of the great article by Graham Lloyd about the book.

Graham Lloyd writes:

There is a big ‘what if’ buried at the heart of Climate Change: The Facts 2020. What if nature has a special way of using the sun, cosmic rays, water vapour and clouds to regulate the temperature of the planet. What if these processes have already been explored but too hastily dismissed? Do they deserve a closer look?

When Jennifer Marohasy sat down to conceive the latest in a series of climate change publications for the Institute of Public Affairs she was determined to remain faithful to the scientific method and be guided by past experience.

In her view, the history of science suggests you don’t actually replace a theory until you come up with another possible explanation.

“Rebuttals don’t cut it unless you have an alternative,” Marohasy says.

The result is Climate Change: The Facts 2020 which can be alternatively described as a thinking sceptic’s guide to climate.

The fourth in a high selling series by the IPA and the second edited by Marohasy, the book deals with a wide range of hot topics from bushfires to sea levels, polar bears, volcanoes and temperature records.

It brings together a wide range of Australian and international voices including polar bear specialist Susan Crockford, investigative journalist Donna Laframboise and satellite temperature measurement pioneer Roy Spencer. The book’s true ambition, however, is captured in the contributions of atmospheric physicists Richard Lindzen and Henrik Svensmark and well known Australian contrarian Peter Ridd.

Lindzen, Svensmark and Ridd each deal with some of the most contentious issues in climate change science, the role of clouds and the sun.
Rather than break new ground each presents a fresh view of established work that has proved difficult for the climate change establishment to accept.

Together, Marohasy argues, the contributions go to the core of anthropogenic climate change theory and ‘give the book longer term currency’.

According to Svensmark, since low clouds are very important for the radiative energy balance of the Earth — by reflecting incoming radiation back to space and in this way casting a shadow — they can cool the Earth’s atmosphere.

He argues it is changes in cosmic-ray flux modulated by the sun and the position of our solar system relative to exploding stars in other galaxies that will drive this. There is no role for carbon dioxide in Svensmark’s theory of climate change.

His leads to the conclusion that a microphysical mechanism involving cosmic rays and clouds is operating in the Earth’s atmosphere, and that this mechanism has the potential to explain a significant part of the observed climate variability over the history of the Earth.

Ridd revisits the pioneering work of Joanne Simpson, who studied cloud formation and tropical thunderstorms, and how they could result in tremendous amounts of energy transfer from the Earth’s surface to the top of the troposphere — where it can be radiated into space.
Simpson is a legend in the meteorological community of the US. She was awarded the American Meteorological Society’s 1983 Carl-Gustav Rossby Research Medal — the highest award in atmospheric sciences. But her climate change theory is not included in the dominant view or models. Ridd builds on the mathematics laid out by Simpson and Herbert Riehl back in 1958 and likens the process to the pistons in a car engine. His punchline is that this huge atmospheric engine helps cool the surface atmosphere.

Applying some mathematics, Ridd shows that more greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere can make the heat engine more powerful. In short, Ridd demonstrates that with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the lower atmosphere, air temperatures can increase and thus raise the water vapour content of the air if this occurs over tropical oceans.
Ridd calculates that for every 1C rise in tropical temperature, the heat transfer by the convection pathway will increase by 10 per cent.

Lindzen, meanwhile, has focused his research on high altitude cirrus clouds and their heating effect on the environment because they reflect infra-red radiation back to Earth. Lindzen makes the analogy with the pupils in our eyes changing size relative to how bright or dim the light is.

Specifically, Lindzen has hypothesised that as the atmosphere warms from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, the area of cirrus cloud decreases, providing a negative feedback as more infra-red radiation is able to escape into space.

Both Lindzen and Ridd hypothesise that there are cloud-related negative feedback loops in place that will mitigate the potential effects of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases on Earth’s temperature.

Neither of them deny the potential for greenhouse gases, especially water vapour and CO2, to warm the Earth. Rather they explain that because of the complexity of the physical processes at work, in particular, and the role clouds play in facilitating negative (cooling) feedbacks, the Earth is unlikely to overheat.

The ideas presented in the book are complex and counter intuitive to the dominant narrative of a world hurtling towards climate catastrophe because of carbon dioxide. And for this Marohasy is unapologetic.

‘We live at a time when climate change is deemed a morally important issue,’ Marohasy says.

It is claimed that greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are causing unprecedented and potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, she argues.

‘Those who disagree with this claim, or who ask for more evidence, are generally labelled “deniers” of climate change,’ Marohasy says.

‘In reality, the dispute is not whether the climate changes; it is what causes the change (could it be mostly natural rather than human-caused), and whether the current rate and magnitude of change is unusual.’

The book is a two-finger salute to what US president Dwight Eisenhower might have called ‘the climate–industrial complex’. In his farewell address, in a television broadcast on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower warned about the dominance, or the ‘capturing’, of science- based public policy by what he called a “scientific–technological elite”.

Marohasy argues it is this same elite who have dictated climate-change policies for some decades now, with wide-ranging economic implications.

‘Many people may prefer their “facts” to be short and to the point,’ Marohasy says in the book’s introductory chapter.

‘But climate science is complicated and, despite the considerable expenditure on research, our understanding of the atmosphere is far from complete.’

Marohasy says she has no doubt that if we had a properly constructed theory of climate, scientists would be able to better forecast droughts, floods and bushfires. There would be less fear of catastrophic sea-level rise, and more curiosity rather than despair when it comes to polar bears and penguins.

Log on, and read the article by Graham, ’tis here.

Peter Ridd and me, just south of Bowen in August 2019. The other side of the mudflat are all the corals that Terry Hughes couldn’t find. More here:https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/2019/05/corals-other-side-of-mud-flat/

Critical Thinking – First Requires an Understanding of the Basics

By

I once assumed everyone knew how to read graphs (charts), but I was wrong. So wrong. Of course, graphs are a quick way to understand patterns in data. They are a quick way to test whether a claim is supported by the data, or not.

But graphs are something quite abstract and they were only invented in the 17th Century, by Rene Descartes.

A chart/graph showing monthly temperatures at Antarctica from my new book, ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020’.

Before anyone can read a graph with confidence, that person has to understand the concept of measurement, understand the number plane (x-axis and y-axis coordinates), and more generally be confident in the language of mathematics.

Everyone wants to be clever, and unique and we all are, in our own way. But to think critically and logically, how much of this needs to be taught? And how much of this can be taught?

I have an old school friend, who has spent her entire career teaching children, and she specialises in teaching mathematics. She was staying with me recently, and commented, “Mathematics has its own language. If a child is ‘stubbing their toe’ on the basic concepts, how will they ever progress to see patterns. How will they ever have confidence reading a graph.”

Catherine also explained to me that children are individuals, thus they develop and mature at different stages. Some need a longer time to consolidate their knowledge base. This includes repetition and practice and can be achieved though fun games and quizzes – and even baking cakes.

The number of parents and grandparents who complain to me about numerical illiteracy and the lack of critical thinking, but don’t know what to do about it.

Catherine has a particular technique for teaching children how to memorise words and number facts. Her NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) method uses visual and auditory memory.

You may argue, “But that is not critical thinking! That is just memorising.”

Her point is, there is no genuine capacity for sophisticated analysis without first grasping the basics and much of this is straight learning that can be facilitated through these visual memory techniques.

To be clear, many children (who grow to become adults) lack confidence in mathematics due to not grasping ‘the basics’, not understanding the language of maths. It does have to be taught, and the more practical the better.

Catherine’s advice for teaching fractions, for example, is do some cooking together.

One of my favourite dessert recipes from Donna Hay’s book ‘Off the Shelf: Cooking from the Pantry’.

Follow the recipe carefully and discuss, perhaps before you even start cooking, the units of measurement and how the ingredient can be divided-up. Finally, work out how the cake can be cut-up (divided), including to ensure everyone gets some and possibly two or even three pieces each. :-).

That got me thinking about possible ways to teach the number plane and coordinates so kids (and adults) have more confidence with charts.

I remember as a kid playing the board game ‘battle ships’, where each ship has its own coordinates to be bombed. Catherine actually plays this game to teach the order of x and y coordinates.

For more information you can contact Catherine who is swap-tutoring.com.au

Catherine tutors children online through her business SWAP (Students with a Purpose).