Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Sunday Reading

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1. WWF Tips to Help Save Energy
by Sun Xiaohua (China Daily),
January 25, 2007.

World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) launched its two-year energy saving campaign, “20 Ways to 20 Percent” in China last weekend after the country flunked the first test to meet its ambitious energy-saving goal in the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-11).

The goal was to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic products (GDP) by 20 percent in five years, or 4 percent a year.

WWF’s 20 tips aimed at helping China achieve its goal, and include use of energy-saving air conditioners, refrigerators, electric bulbs and tubes and washing machines, unplugging household appliances when they are not in use, making paperless business a reality and using more public transport.

Read the complete article: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-01/25/content_791885.htm

2. Running the Rule over Stern’s Numbers
by Simon Cox and Richard Vadon (BBC Radio 4, The Investigation),
January 25, 2007.

When the Stern Review into the Economics of Climate Change came out last year, it was showered with praise.
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair called it, “the most important report on the future ever published by this government”.
But expert critics of the review now claim that it overestimates the risk of severe global warming, and underestimates the cost of acting to stop it.

Read the complete article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6295021.stm

3. Bush’s ‘clean fuel’ move may cause more harm, say environmentalists
by Andrew Buncombe (The Independent),
January 25, 2007.

Environmentalists are unimpressed with George Bush’s pledge to develop alternative sources of energy – accusing him of failing to confront the real issues driving climate change.

In his address on Tuesday, Mr Bush called for a large boost in the production of alternative fuels, along with an increase in efficiency standards for petrol-engine vehicles. “These technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change,” he said.

Read the complete article here: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2183876.ece

4. US Government proposes geoengineering and plantetary protection as “insurance policy”
by David Adams(The Guardian),
January 27, 2007.

The US government wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.

Read the complete article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1999967,00.html

Negligible Temperature Increase Incompatible with Climate Models: A Note from Vincent Gray

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Hi Jennifer,

The draft ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the Fourth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been widely leaked to the Press.

Its crucial conclusion is as follows:

“It is very likely that anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases caused most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century.”

The widely available graph of the globally averaged annual temperature anomalies between 1857 and 2005 shows, for the period since the mid-20th century:

1. No warming between 1950 and 1978

2. No warming between 1998 and 2005

The only ”observed” warming over the period is from 1978 to 1998, 20 years only, out of the 55 years.

The actual warming involved over this short period of 1978 to 1998 was 0.53ºC.

The above statement considers that it is very likely that most of this 0.53ºC was caused by anthropogenic (human-induced) greenhouse gas increases. “Most” of this would be between 0.3ºC and 0.5ºC, the amount that the statement considers to be due to human influence.

This temperature rise is negligible.

None of us would notice if it happened instantly, let alone over 50 years.

It is below the amount considered in the weather forecasts. Yet this small temperature rise over 55 years is routinely blamed for all manner of climate disasters.

The IPCC pronouncement is not a certain one. The term “very likely” is defined as amounting to a probability above 90%. In other words, there is one chance in ten that they are wrong. Also, the probability is based on the opinion (or guess) of “experts” who are financially dependent on an expectation of positive results.

Finally, there has been no “warming” at all since 1998, now eight years. “Global Warming” seems to have come to an end.

This temperature record is quite incompatible with the computer climate models, so why should we believe their pessimistic forecasts for the future?

It should also be noted that there has been negligible warming in New Zealand since 1950. The mean temperature for 2006 was 0.7ºC below that for 2005. According to the temperature record for Christchurch, there was no warming since 1910, with a maximum temperature in 1917.

Cheers,
Vincent Gray
Wellington, New Zealand

Climate Change Crusader Named Australian of the Year

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Australian Prime Minister John Howard has announced that climate change crusader Tim Flannery is the winner of the nation’s highest honour Australian of the Year.

At a ceremony in Canberra earlier today, Mr Howard said as an explorer, writer and climate change crusader Professor Flannery has helped millions better understand the environment.

In his recent book ‘The Weather Makers’ Tim Flannery makes various claims many of which are very fashionable, but appear to lack a scientific basis.

For example, he writes that animal species are vanishing as a result of climate change right now and that a dramatic decline in rainfall along the east coast of Australia may result in the extinction of various species of frog:

“In the early 1990s, frogs began to disappear en masse from the rainforests of northern Queensland and, as with the golden toad, these vanishings occurred in otherwise undisturbed rainforest. Today some sixteen frog species (13 percent of Australia’s total amphibian fauna), have experienced dramatic declines. The cause is still debated, but the climate change experienced in eastern Australia over the past few decades cannot have been good for frogs, for a persistence of El Nino-like conditions has brought about a dramatic decline in Australia’s east coast rainfall. The latest analysis suggest that at least in the case of the gastric brooder and day frog, climate change was the most likely cause for their disappearance.” (pg. 121)

Yet data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology doesn’t show the claimed dramatic decline in rainfall.

Here’ the graph for eastern Australian from 1900 to 2006:

rainfall eastern aus _06b.JPG

In fact the 11-year running average looks pretty flat.

Australian PM Announces New Water Plan

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The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has just today announced a new plan for the management of water in Australia. He suggested a $10 billion budget for the following 10 point plan:

1. A nationwide investment in Australia’s irrigation infrastructure to line and pipe major delivery channels.
2. A nationwide programme to improve on-farm irrigation technology and metering.
3. The sharing of water savings on a 50/50 basis between irrigators and the Commonwealth leading to greater water security and increased environmental flows.
4. Addressing once and for all, water over-allocation in the Murray-Darling Basin.
5. A new set of governance arrangements for the Basin [Transfer of governance from the States to the Commonwealth].
6. A sustainable cap on surface and groundwater use in the Basin.
7. Major engineering works at key sites in the Murray-Darling Basin such as the Barmah Choke and Menindee Lakes.
8. Expanding the role of the Bureau of Meteorology to provide the water data necessary for good decision-making by governments and industry.
9. A taskforce to explore future land and water development in Northern Australia.
10. Completion of the restoration of the Great Artesian Basin.

Following is the transcript of the speech at the National Press Club, Great Hall, Parliament House:

“A National Plan for Water Security Thank you very much Mr Chairman. I’m happy again to address the National Press Club on some of the great challenges that face our nation in 2007. Last year I spoke about the great sense of balance in public life and public policy which have been a hallmark of the Australian achievement.

Today I want to address in a very direct and detailed fashion one of the great challenges of our time and that is water security. Before doing so let me, of course, remind you that whatever policies we may have, in areas as specific as water security, ultimately, for their effective implementation, they depend upon the continuing strength and growth of the Australian economy. And there is no greater single challenge in face of this government and of others in public life, than demonstrating a capacity to maintain the enormous prosperity of this nation at the beginning of 2007.

Our lowest unemployment rate in more than a generation, a higher level of business investment, a very pleasing reminder that inflationary pressures are tending downward rather than in the other direction; none of these things have occurred by accident. They are not some kind of automatic God given right, they are only achieved by the implementation of the right policies in the right fashion based on experience and a capacity to take the decisions necessary to maintain the prosperity of our country.

Water has always been at the very heart of the existence of the Australian nation. It influenced the life and the activity of the first Australians. It determined that the British settlement would occur at Port Jackson rather than at Botany Bay, and the great Federation drought of 1892 through to the early part of the next century inspired Dorothea Mackellar to pen those immortal words about droughts and flooding rains. As we grew and prospered as a nation after World War II, we placed heavy demands on our water resources, but that was a time when we invested heavily in infrastructure. We built the great Snowy Mountains Scheme, we invested heavily in dams and other ways of ensuring that our water resources were there and were available.

But by the time of the 1980s, policies began to change. Governments became reluctant, for a combination, in some cases of misguided implementation of environmental policies, became reluctant to invest in the construction of water conservation infrastructure, particularly dams. And that, of course, created understandable concern about the availability of water to look after us in the years ahead. In the last decade or so, we’ve begun to turn this around. Billions of dollars both at the state and a federal level have been set aside for projects individual projects. Our own $2 billion Water Fund is leveraging major investments in every state. And through the Living Murray Initiative, we are on the way to restoring six iconic environmental sites in our greatest river system. And with the National Water Initiative, a long-term framework is finally in place to increase the efficiency of water use, to service the needs of communities, and to return our river and groundwater systems to environmental health. Despite this, the current trajectory of water use and management in Australia is not sustainable. In a protracted drought, and with the prospect of long-term climate change, we need radical and permanent change.

I regard myself as a climate change realist…

Read the full transcript here: http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech2342.html

I intend to post a critique in a day or two.

Parachutes & Prescribed Burning: A Note from David Ward

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“It has come to my notice, through a regular contributor to this blog (Rog), that Professor Smith, of Cambridge University, has submitted a systematic review of parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge. He found that there was no experimental, evidence based support for their use (Smith & Pell, British Medical Journal 2003;327:1459-1461).

A letter by Professor Brendan Mackey of ANU (23 Dec 2006) to the Canberra Times, suggested that there is no experimental, evidence based support for the use of widespread prescribed burning to prevent large, dangerous bushfires. A similar opposition to widespread prescribed burning, citing support from ‘most authorities’, has been expressed by Professor Rob Whelan, of Woollongong University, in a letter to a well known journal (Nature416, 15: 2002). Both these letters were, of course, before the recent, and ongoing bushfires in south-eastern Australia.

Professor Smith, the author of the parachute review, proposed that those who demand rigorous evidence from randomised, controlled parachute experiments should themselves volunteer as a control group, without parachute treatment.

May I suggest that Professors Mackey and Whelan, and other academics opposed to widespread prescribed burning, should volunteer, as a control group, to sit in long unburnt bush, on a hot day, as a fire approaches. They should publish their observations (posthumously) in a refereed journal.

I, and others with real bushfire experience, will volunteer to sit in an adjacent large patch of bush recently treated by prescribed burning. I guarantee we will see more native plants and animals, both before and after the fire, than the professorial control group, and, unlike them, will be available for further experiments.

Dave Ward
aka Davey Gam Esq

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Previous posts by Davey include:

Fire, Folly and Dead Canaries, 20th June 2005
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000703.html

Species Vulnerable to Extinction, 12th March 2006
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001253.html

Noogars Knew Best, 17th June 2005
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000672.html