Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Humour

A Depression Would Reduce Carbon Emissions

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PREDICTIONS for the planet are dire indeed, if we do not drastically cut our carbon dioxide emissions in the very near future. 

In Australia, we will lose the Barrier Reef and the Kakadu wetlands, the Murray River will dry up completely and snow vanish from our Alpine regions.  Sea level could rise precipitously as the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic melt.

On the economic front, things have actually gone from bad to worse.  The sub-prime crisis has morphed into fears of a global recession, perhaps even a depression.  Bastions of United States capitalism such as General Motors now teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. Here in Australia, companies that run child-care centres and shopping malls are collapsing.  Even our iron ore shipments are now being cancelled by China. The world price of oil has plummeted 60 percent in just a few months – the reason is an anticipated reduction in global demand.

[Read more…] about A Depression Would Reduce Carbon Emissions

Correcting Global Cooling (Part 2)

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THERE has been some anecdotal evidence suggesting that last month, October 2008, was unusually cold.  The sophisticated weather-watcher, of course, waits for some official global temperature data to be published before concluding very much. 

Al Gore’s scientific advisor, James Hansen from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), publishes a monthly mean global surface temperature. 

Some dispute the methodology Dr Hansen uses to arrive at his monthly mean values, but nevertheless I have observed that his GISS data is usually somewhere in the vicinity of the data from the Hadley Centre at the UK Meteorology Bureau and the Satellite data compiled at the University of Alabama, Huntsville – though yes Dr Hansen’s data is usually on the warm side.  [Read more…] about Correcting Global Cooling (Part 2)

Ten Worst Blog Posts: A Note from Cohenite

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EVER since public computer networks burst onto the scene in the 1980’s, the subject of online content has been a controversial one, explained Mark Newton at e-journal On Line Opinion last week.   A few months ago, 30 July 2008, John Stewart on Australian ABC television’s Lateline described online blogs as one of the few places where the science of climate change is still debated.  Now, occasional blogger, Cohenite, has come up with the 10 worst climate blog posts on the basis, “they all represent a denial of not only the intrinsic transparency of the web but also the openness necessary for scientific debate and to this extent they reveal that at least part of this debate about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not about science, but its suppression.” 

Here goes, the ten worst, according to Cohenite:

1. On April 16, 2008, at a blog called ‘Open Mind’, the prince of AGW, he who is known as Tamino, posted a piece entitled ‘Perjury’. Tamino’s basis for the charge of perjury was that someone had claimed there had been a temperature decline since 1998. [Read more…] about Ten Worst Blog Posts: A Note from Cohenite