Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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WikiLeaks Reveal US Obsession with Securing Copenhagen

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“The leaked US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

“Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on 12 February records a meeting between US embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. “The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a US commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would ‘take the pressure off climate change negotiations’.”

“US determination to seek allies against its most powerful adversaries – the rising economic giants of Brazil, South Africa, India, China (Basic) – is set out in another cable from Brussels on 17 February reporting a meeting between the deputy national security adviser, Michael Froman, Hedegaard and other EU officials.

“Froman said the EU needed to learn from Basic’s skill at impeding US and EU initiatives and playing them off against each in order “to better handle third country obstructionism and avoid future train wrecks on climate”.

Read more at the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-us-manipulated-climate-accord

Qatar Outbids US and Australia for Soccer Matches

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The oil rich Gulf state of Qatar has out bided Australia, and even the US, for the FIFA Soccer World Cup.  According to The Australian:

“The Gulf state’s climate that will be so hot during the World Cup that the organisers admit they will need to build massive air-conditioning systems for entire stadiums, training facilities and fan zones to avoid serious health risks.”

Perhaps there are opportunities here for the carbon offsets industry?   Perhaps those who really care about Anthropogenic Global Warming should boycott the event?

After all, according to Wikipedia:

“Qatar has the highest per-capita carbon dioxide emissions, at 55.5 metric tons per person in 2005. This is almost double the next highest per-capita emitting country, which is Kuwait at 30.7 metric tons (2005) and they are three times those of the United States. Qatar had the highest per-capita carbon dioxide emissions for the past 18 years. These emissions are largely due to high rates of energy use in Qatar. Major uses of energy in Qatar include air conditioning, natural gas processing, water desalination and electricity production. Between 1995 and 2011 the electricity generating capacity of Qatar will have increased to six times the previous level. The fact that Qataris do not have to pay for either their water or electricity supplies is thought to contribute to their high rate of energy use. Despite being a desert state they are also one of the highest consumers of water per capita per day, using around 400 litres.”

The Case of Irish Oaks Tree Rings

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Queen’s University Belfast holds an extensive database on tree rings, particularly Irish oaks; information that may be used in the reconstruction of past climate conditions.  A request for this information from Doug Keenan under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Legislation was disputed on the basis of intellectual property rights, compliance costs and usefulness of the information as a proxy for temperature. 

John Abbot and I review the saga and its implications in a new paper:

Accessing environmental information relating to climate change: the case of Irish oaks tree rings. Environmental Law and Management 2010 Volume 22, Issue 4, 172-181.

Quoting from the paper,

“The QUB case suggests a degree of misunderstanding with respect to some of the legal issues, which is not entirely surprising. The case also reveals confusion amongst the dendroclimatology community as to exactly which trees are useful to reconstruct past temperatures, arguably a more significant finding given the reliance on these interpretations in formulating public policy…

“Much of the tree ring data requested by Mr Keenan specifically related to Irish oaks. According to Mr Keenan, this data is extremely valuable for global warming studies for reconstructing temperatures over past millennia.  Professor Mike Baillie [a recognized expert in dendrochronology who became the public voice for QUB], however, disputes this, claiming that the oak data is not relevant to temperature reconstruction records. 

‘Although ancient oaks could give an indication of oneoff dramatic climatic events, such as droughts, they were not useful as a temperature proxy because they were highly sensitive to water availability as well as past temperatures. In my view it would be dangerous to try and make interpretations about the temperature from this data. It’s been dressed up as though we are suppressing climate data, but we have never produced climate records from our tree rings.’

Dr Rob Wilson from the University of St Andrews tree ring laboratory has concurred, stating that ‘oaks were virtually useless as a temperature proxy’.

In 1982 Professor Baillie and co-workers did in fact publish a study using oaks from 13 sites in Britain including some from Ireland, reporting temperature and rainfall reconstructions. In more recent technical publications Baillie and co-workers, however, explain that 20 years
ago dendroclimatic studies using Irish oaks were discontinued because trees growing in the British Isles are less sensitive to temperature than trees in Scandinavia and Siberia…

In light of these reservations that the temperature signal from oak trees may be difficult to determine, it is relevant to note that a multi-proxy study incorporating 47 data series, of which 37 were based on tree ring widths, with 7 from oaks, including 1 from Northern Ireland
spanning the period 1001–1970, was cited in the 2007 IPCC report.

More recently, Professor Michael Mann and co-workers have incorporated tree ring data from oaks, including Irish oak data from QUB, in multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the last millennium in support of their famous ‘hockey stick’ temperature proxies which featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC reports, which later came under intense scrutiny for its statistical validity. In this technical paper more than 110 datasets from oaks were included in a primary set of 926 tree rings from the International Tree Ring Data Bank. For some multi-proxy reconstructions this primary dataset was reduced to 484 by statistical screening, but it is unclear to what extent the oak data was retained.

Invitation to The Land’s Gala Centenary Dinner

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 Set down for Saturday, February 26, 2011 at Sydney Olympic Park Homebush, The Land’s gala Centenary Dinner will officially kick start a year of celebrations designed to acknowledge those who have supported us over the last 100 years.

The Land is the flagship paper for Rural Press and I’ve been a fortnightly columnist since about April 2004.  

To be held inside the Badgery Pavilion, the dinner will be the major fundraiser for The Land’s designated charity, The Rural Doctors Association of NSW.

Seating has been restricted to 750 guests and will include a sumptuous three course gourmet meal, full beverage service plus live and silent auctions on the night.  Monies raised will go towards establishing two scholarships for young rural doctors.

Tickets are available at $150 with a special 10% discount for tables of ten.

If readers and commentators of this blog would like to join me at this special event email or leave a comment below.  If there are ten of us we can have our own table.

http://thelandcentenary.com.au/centenary_dinner.html

Bobos in Paradise, and in Australia

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IT is ten years since the book was published, and I wish I had read it ten years ago.   ‘Bodos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There’ by David Brooks, 2000, has made me reassess my understanding of the Australian Greens and what their constituents really value.

While Brook’s book is based on an assessment of the new elite in the US, it is apparent from the work of Australian demographer, John Black, that the new political force in Australian politics is identical in key ways.   Importantly, those who vote for the Australian Green are not only the richest voters in Australia but they also have a significant interest in the success of the mining industry.

Mr Black was interviewed by Paul Comrie-Thomson on Counterpoint earlier in the year:

John Black: That’s right, the National Party is traditionally run by wealthy people who represent poor people, and the Greens tends to be run by lower income people representing rich people but who seem to have a view that their constituency is decidedly bolshy in terms of economic policy when in fact there’s absolutely no evidence of that at all, and in fact the evidence is to the contrary.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: So in fact if green voters see green political parties threatening their income stream, they’ll dump them. Is that how you see it?

John Black: In a New York second. This is not rocket science. People vote politically as consumers, and I fall back on my old Marxist historians for that little piece of wisdom. People do not vote to lose money, that’s a case in point. Your green voter now has shares, your green voter now doesn’t have children. Because they don’t have children they have money, they have investment homes, they have shares. The simple correlations between ownership of investments, including shares, and the top income group was +0.94. You don’t get any stronger than that. I mean, share ownership is clustered in then top quartile, green votes are clustered in the top quartile. Green voters are born overseas, they’re the kind of people who were getting $100,000+ in WA on the old AWAs. They were into them with their ears back. These are rich, cosmopolitan, internationally qualified people.

According to David Brooks writing about Bobos in the US:  This new elite has been subtly influenced by the counterculture of the sixties and the opportunities provided by information technology.  The most successful and most influential individuals are highly educated with one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another in the bourgeois realm of ambition and world success.   

A big tension for them, and source of much anxiety, is how to reconcile worldly success with inner virtue.   According to Brooks this is achieved by creating a way of living that that lets you be an affluent success and at the same time a free-spirit rebel.   Founding design firms, they find a way to be an artist and still qualify for stock options.  They incorporate Rolling Stones anthems into their marketing campaigns.  They’ve reconciled the antiestablishment style with the corporate imperative.

The Political Solution to Australia’s Energy Dilemma: Open Letter to Greg Combet from Phil Sawyer

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The Hon Greg Combet  AM MP

Dear Greg, 

Recognising the important role that you will undoubtedly play in shaping our future energy policies, and mindful of the difficult situation that we, as a party, currently find ourselves in, I write to respectfully suggest that there is, under our noses, a politically adroit solution to our dilemma, a policy change that would not only solve the knotty problem of arriving at a credible climate response that doesn’t compromise our national development trajectory, but would also serve to recast our relations with the Greens at the same time. 

I would be very interested in your thoughts on the merits of my arguments, and especially in your judgement as to whether or not the left could be persuaded to support such a policy change.  I am also forwarding a copy of this letter to Don Farrell.
 
Briefly put, I wish to argue that our traditional opposition to nuclear energy has effectively blinded us to the significant advantages that would actually follow from a well managed change in policy, and that our politically expedient concord with the greens on this issue is coming at a very high cost, to the party, to the Government, and to the public interest, and that it needs an urgent rethink. 

I go on to make the case for the inclusion of nuclear energy in the currently bipartisan MRET scheme, a policy change that, when analysed for its political implications, shows that distinct advantages would accrue to us if we did so.

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