Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Letter to Nature about Arctic Sea-Ice Decline

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Julia Slingo and Rowan Sutton of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Walker Institute for Climate System Research, University of Reading, have an interesting letter in this week’s Nature magazine. They point out that this year’s loss of sea-ice cover in the Arctic is unlikely to be explained by temperature change alone. Arctic wind anomolies are implicated as part of a global pattern of exceptional summer circulation.

They conclude:

“The growing La Niña in the East Pacific undoubtedly had a major influence globally, and there is some evidence from past events that La Niña predisposes the circulation towards the type of exceptional patterns seen this summer.”

Special Drought Statement from BoM

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For large parts of southern and eastern Australia, dry conditions have now persisted since October
1996, a total of eleven years. For some areas, the accumulated total rainfall deficit over this period
now exceeds a full year’s normal rain.

For the agriculturally important Murray-Darling Basin, however, October 2007 marks the sixth
anniversary of lower than average rainfall totals, with the November 2001 to October 2007 period
being its equal driest such six-year period on record.

This extreme dry period for the Murray-Darling Basin has also been accompanied by high
temperatures, exacerbating the low rainfall. Both daytime maximum and daily mean temperatures
for the six years from November 2001 to October 2007 have surpassed the previous records by a
considerable margin.

Read the 6 page pdf:

SPECIAL CLIMATE STATEMENT 14

Six years of widespread drought in southern and eastern Australia
November 2001–October 2007

Issued 1st November 2007
National Climate Centre

2007 Nobel Peace Prize Winner No. 2498 – John Christy

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There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

The above are extracts from The Wall Street Journal article ‘My Nobel Moment’