Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

What is Wilderness (Part 13)

By

What is wilderness? Dave W provides some insights…

IT is a place that is not under human control: a place where people might pass through, but not stay: a land where the wild beasts rule. Before people existed, the world was one vast wilderness. Since we’ve been around, wild areas are less and less common. An antonym would be city or any other noun defining more or less permanent human habitations, e.g. town, village, campsite. A campfire is a very basic method of keeping wilderness at bay.

This, I think, has been the generally accepted meaning of wilderness. I find it a more robust and useful word than ‘nature’, which is usually debased by the attempt to exclude people from the definition. People are part of Nature – we evolved here and we haven’t left yet. People are not part of a wilderness.

Of course, once ‘wilderness’ has been defined by legislation, other definitions may apply, but at least the US Wilderness Act (1964) seemed to follow the general sense: “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

I think it is reasonable to define wilderness as a continuum, rather than an absolute. Areas are more or less wild depending on how much control people are able to exert. I don’t think that pollution, exotic weeds, or similar effluvia of human life are of any relevance to defining wilderness. Those do not result from attempts to control an area. Also, I don’t demand that everyone respond the same to wilderness. Some may find it exhilarating and renewing, others may find it terrifying. I’ve been lost in wild areas, so I’ve felt both extremes.

Wilderness Dave

The picture/image is of a wild place, but not a wilderness: White Spruce regenerating in Alberta Aspen Parkland thanks to fire suppression regime (favours spruce), the reintroduction of beaver (eat aspen), and increasing moose populations (eat aspen before spruce) thanks to hunting regulation and extermination of wolves. Click on the image to see more, to gain perspective.

Dave W is a biologist who has worked in North America and Au​stralia and has about 150 scientific publications including one in Ecological Modelling on climate change that Google Scholar tells him is his 13th most significant publication, but that he thinks was just an interesting ‘what if?’ exercise with little or no relevance to any actual ecosystem.

****
For some other perspectives on wilderness click and scroll here https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/tag/wilderness/

Perhaps send me your thoughts on wilderness…
jennifermarohasy at gmail.com

Myth and the Bureau of Meteorology

By

WE know that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology can’t forecast weather more than a few days out. So why should we believe a climate forecast to 2030?

According to Sara Phillips, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Bureau’s new State of the Climate 2014 report is a reliable source of information because it distils hundreds of experiments into three consistent reports.BOM

In fact there are few if any experiments that have been distilled in the writing of the reports. Rather Bureau staff have ran some computer simulations designed to produce a particular output, and combined this with homogenised and adjusted historical records again designed to produce a particular result. Conclusions include:

1. Australia’s climate has warmed by 0.9°C since 1910, and the frequency of extreme weather has changed, with more extreme heat and fewer cool extremes.

2. Global mean temperature has risen by 0.85°C from 1880 to 2012.

When I wrote to the Bureau in January asking why the national average is only calculated back to 1910, I received a reply explaining that data prior to 1910 “is often fragmented and of uncertain or low quality”. If this were the case, it begs the question how a global mean temperature can be calculated back to 1880?

This is one of seven questions I’ve put to Greg Hunt, Minister for the Environment, in a letter dated 4th March 2014. Minister Hunt is ultimately responsible for the operations of the Bureau and I’m of the opinion their operations deserve close scrutiny.

There is this myth that the Bureau is comprised of hard working scientists providing, like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, information without bias or agenda. More likely the Bureau, like the mainstream climate science community more generally, has become somewhat compromised.

Of particular concern to me, is the Bureau’s decision of last June, to discard the statistical models that had been used to generate seasonal rainfall forecasts in favour of a general circulation model that has no predictive skill at all. I have documented the absence of skill in the general circulation model in a peer-reviewed paper recently published in the journal Atmospheric Research (Volume 138, Pages 166-178).

I conclude my letter to Minster Hunt with comment that:

If the temperature record for Australia can be extended back to 1860, providing an additional 50 years of data, then this should be a priority. This information is more important than the calculation of a national average temperature. If data is to be adjusted and homogenized then the methodology applied needs to be clearly stated. Indeed having access to all the available records as far back as possible is important because it helps unravel the true features of the natural climate cycle, a goal that meteorologists and astronomers were working towards well before the establishment of the Bureau in 1908.

In arriving at theories that explain the natural world, the best scientists always use all the available data, not just the data that happens to fit a particular viewpoint. Furthermore, long historical data series are critical for statistical methods of rainfall forecasts, including the application of artificial neural networks that can currently provide more skillful forecasts than POAMA, the general circulation model currently used by the Bureau to produce the official forecasts. That the Bureau persists with POAMA, while failing to disclose to the Australian public the absence of any measurable skill in its monthly and seasonal forecasts, should be of grave concern to the Australian parliament.

My letter to the Minister can be read in its entirety here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/questions-for-the-australian-bureau-of-meteorology/

Not a Natural Disaster, Just another Rainfall Deficit

By

In announcing yesterday’s $320 million drought assistance package for farmers there was some mention of the situation out west being akin to a natural disaster. A more accurate description would be that its part of a natural cycle – not a natural disaster.

There are many reasons why landholders may be particularly vulnerable to this drought, but they mostly relate to government initiatives that have over the last couple of decades significantly eroded the resilience of farming communities, rather than exceptional climate.

We live in a land of highly variable rainfall that has historically experienced regular drought often broken with big floods.

The Bureau of Meteorology has been defining the drought as a rainfall deficient for a 16-month period (October 2012-January 2014) relative to a long-term average defined as the years 1961-1990. So according to the Bureau there has been a severe rainfall deficiencies (lowest 10% to 5% of records) in place across much of inland Queensland, central northern New South Wales and in a small area on the coast of Western Australia near Shark Bay. Also, most of Queensland west of the ranges, northern New South Wales, northeastern South Australia and the southeastern Northern Territory has received less than 65% of the long-term (1961–1990) average rainfall for the 16-month period.

While I am sympathetic to farmers struggling to make ends meet, and I don’t begrudge anyone some government support when the chips are really down, to suggest there is a natural disaster because rainfall is less than 65% of what it was during the period 1961-1990 for a period of a bit over a year is absurd. Australian rainfall

[Read more…] about Not a Natural Disaster, Just another Rainfall Deficit

ABC Rural Reports on New Rainfall Forecast Model

By

ABOUT one week after Central Queensland University put out a media release announcing the publication of our latest paper on medium-term rainfall forecasting, John Abbot and I received a phone call from the ABC, from a rural reporter.

Part of the interview with Professor Abbot can be heard online here, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-21/nrn-forecast/5275122

ABC journalists Cassie Hough and Kathleen Calderwood have also written a short article based on the interview in which they effectively capture the key points, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-21/nrn-forecast/5275122

And following is a succinct summary of the interview by one of the media monitoring services:

“New research from the University of Central Qld shows medium-term rainfall forecasts may be more accurately predicted by a form of artificial intelligence, which aim to predict the weather through pattern detection, and predicts not what the weather will do day-to-day, but in a month or more. John Abbot, researcher, says he was motivated to do the research after the huge flood at the start of 2011.

Abbot talks about how his research works, and the problems with modern-day weather forecasting systems, and says farmers and mine-operators need accurate data as opposed to vagaries. Abbot says he would like the Bureau of Meteorology take more interest in what he is doing.”

John Abbot

The paper can be downloaded from Science Direct, with full open access available until March 26, here,
http://elsarticle.com/1ej97n3

[Open access until March 26, 2014]

Highlights include:

1. Artificial neural networks are developed to forecast monthly rainfall for localities in Queensland.

2. Comparative utility of input variables, including local maximum and minimum temperatures, is tested in the artificial neural network.

3. The Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation, IPO, is found to have utility for rainfall forecasting.

4. Artificial neural networks forecasts are superior to Australian Bureau of Meteorology official seasonal and monthly forecasts.

When Ngurunderi walked across the Murray’s mouth

By

AUSTRALIA was erroneously considered terra nullius at the time of European settlement. I know this wasn’t a land belonging to no one because there are the dreamtime stories, including the story about the formation of the Murray River. It happened as the hunter of creation times chased the mighty Murray cod downstream, the bends and reaches being formed as the fish thrashed along the channel. This happened a long time before Captain Charles Sturt sailed his whaleboat across Lake Alexandrina in February 1830.

Different indigenous tribes have slightly different versions of essentially the same dreamtime story. According to the Wotjobaluk people of the Wergaia tribe of the Wimmera region of northwestern Victoria, the hunter was named Totyerguil. According to the Yaraldi people of the Lower Murray his name was Ngurunderi. The story of Ngurunderi, as told by Albert Karloan, a council-member of the Manangki clan, Yaraldi tribe, to the anthropologists Ronald Berndt in 1939, is much more interesting, and perhaps much more historically relevant for Australians than anything we might read about Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis.Ngurunderi

[Read more…] about When Ngurunderi walked across the Murray’s mouth

General Circulation Models Can’t Forecast Seasonal Rainfall

By

I’ve just published in the peer-reviewed literature explaining:

“Much of the present research effort by government institutions in Australia, which is focused on monthly and seasonal rainfall forecasts, is limited to the application of general circulation models, in particular, POAMA. However, results so far have been disappointing with medium-term monthly forecasts consistently about equivalent to, or worse than, climatology, Table 4. Nevertheless in June 2013, POAMA was adopted as the system for generating the BOM’s official seasonal forecasts.”

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169809513003141
[Open access until March 26, 2014]

In short, the Bureau could better serve the Australian public by just updating and publishing the long-term average rainfall each month for localities for which it has statistics, rather than pretending it can generate a reliable forecast. And I offer the same advice to the UK Met Office which yet again botched its seasonal weather forecast. The following quotes via Benny Peiser at The Global Warming Policy Foundation.Birmingham duck pon

BUNGLING weather bosses predicted a drier than usual winter, it has emerged. The Met Office’s staggeringly inaccurate forecast was made at the end of November last year – just a month before the record-breaking deluge began. And the agency gave just a one in seven chance the three following months would “fall into the wettest category”. On Nov 21, its experts predicted: “For the December-January-February period as a whole, there is a slight signal for below-average precipitation”. The calamitous estimate emerged as Downing Street dubbed the devastation caused by the floods as “Biblical”. –Tom Newton Dunn, Political Editor, The Sun, 11 February 2014 [Read more…] about General Circulation Models Can’t Forecast Seasonal Rainfall