Jennifer Marohasy

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Undemocratic Politics Again Determines Land Use in Tasmania: Alan Ashbarry

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A decision made in Cambodia in June by the United Nation’s World Heritage committee could add 172,000 hectares of forest to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. The Gillard government is seeking to have the deal sealed without proper scrutiny, in particular by using a loophole in the UN guidelines to label it as a “minor” modification so it can be approved before a likely change of government in September.

The proposal for a “minor” boundary modification was developed by the Federal minister for the Environment, Tony Burke, as part of the outcomes of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement signed between three main environmental lobby groups and industry representatives on 22 November 2012. The industry signed up with the hope the proposal would end years of campaigning against the Tasmanian forest industry.

Photography by Jennifer Marohasy, Tasmania , May 2005
Photography by Jennifer Marohasy, Tasmania , May 2005

The World Heritage area has been controversial since it was first inscribed in 1982 when only 769,355 ha in size, and led to the 1983 Australian High Court ruling that the Commonwealth’s external relations powers gave it the right to prevent the flooding of the Franklin River for a renewable Hydro power scheme, not withstanding Tasmania’s constitutional land use rights.

It was the subject of the Commonwealth’s Helsham inquiry in the late 1980’s that examined the need for a further extension to the wilderness. The majority finding was overturned by the Hawke government, and a proposal adding 604,645 ha, i.e. a 78 per cent increase, was accepted by the World Heritage Committee. The extension was said by the environment Minister Graham Richardson to cement the green preference strategy to re-elect the Hawke ALP government. [Read more…] about Undemocratic Politics Again Determines Land Use in Tasmania: Alan Ashbarry

The Great Barrier Reef: Have we Really Lost Half of It? [Part 1: Water Quality]

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IT was all over the news again this morning, that unless action is taken to improve water quality the Great Barrier Reef could be placed on the World Heritage list of sites in danger and by the way, there has already been a 50 percent decline in coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef.

No wonder the average person is concerned about the environment! Such casual reporting that we have already lost a full half of the Great Barrier Reef!

Photograph by Walter Starck
Photograph by Walter Starck

This publicity is all part of a campaign to stop the development of new port facilities along the Queensland coastline. But rather than just come out and say they don’t want more development– that in fact they despise industry– the activist scientists dress it up as the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it. [Read more…] about The Great Barrier Reef: Have we Really Lost Half of It? [Part 1: Water Quality]

Greg Hunt’s Carbon Buy-Back Scheme for Australia

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THE Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Greg Hunt MP, was in Brisbane yesterday explaining the Coalition’s plan to tackle climate change post September 14, 2013. You can download the manifesto as presented at the seminar here:

The Coalition’s Direct Action Plan, 29 April 2013 (9.8MB)

Clearly the Coalition has no intention of showing leadership on this issue with Mr Hunt explaining that:

“We agree with the Government on the science of climate change, we agree on the targets to reduce emissions and we agree on using markets as the best mechanism.”

But I can’t see how this “Direct Action Plan” can possibly work as detailed, in particular the economics of revegetation for carbon sequestration and soil carbon sequestration don’t add-up. Yet Mr Hunt claims:

“The fund will not only reduce our emissions, it will improve Australia’s environment through a range of measures including revegetation, better land management and enhanced soil quality.”

But hang on. Mr Hunt is claiming the price of carbon will climb to $350 per tonne by 2050. Ha! Hasn’t anyone told Mr Hunt that the carbon market recently collapsed in Europe?  Only a fool or a politician could write:

“This simple, straightforward approach is a vastly better way to tackle climate change than the blunt instrument that is the Carbon Tax, which has already inflicted economy-wide pain and will continue to do so as it climbs to its own predicted price of $350 per tonne of C02 by 2050. That is why we will repeal the Carbon Tax and replace it with a classic reverse auction system, based on incentive and innovation.”

What a crock!

Sarah Ferguson Defends Abattoir Footage of Dubious Origin

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IN June 2011 the Australian government halted all live cattle exports to Indonesia after ABC Four Corners broadcast disturbing footage of Australian cattle being mistreated in Indonesian abattoirs. As I wrote in May 2012, Australians were lead to believe that this footage, that shocked the nation, was typical of what occurs inside many abattoirs in Indonesia and that the footage was taken by Lyn White from Animals Australia [1]. However, according to British filmmakers Gem and Ian from ‘Tracks Investigations’ they were responsible for the footage that sparked massive public opposition [2]. Nowhere in the Four Corners program is the involvement of these professional filmmakers declared; activists who for a fee “offer a comprehensive global investigation and film production service to conservation, environmental and animal protection groups.”[3]

In the following email, which Sarah Ferguson from ABC Four Corners has asked me to publish, she explains that my recent column in The Land on the same topic is “mischievous” [4]. In particular she claims a first hand knowledge of the situation in Indonesia and that half the abattoir footage in the program was filmed by Four Corners.

[Read more…] about Sarah Ferguson Defends Abattoir Footage of Dubious Origin

The Apple on the Banana Again: Marcott Admits Temperature Spike Not Robust

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IT is terribly unfashionable to admit it, but I’ve just never been able to believe that the late 20th Century was particularly warm. This admission despite ‘the hockey stick’ graph that featured so prominently in the United Nation’s third IPCC assessment report, and despite that amazing looking chart in Al Gore’s movie that also showed a recent spike in global temperatures relative to the last many thousand years.

My key problem with the ‘the hockey stick’ has always been that the upward spike representing runaway global warming in the 20th Century was never of the same stuff as the rest of the chart. That is the spike is largely based on the instrumental temperature record i.e. the thermometer record, while the downward trending line that it was grafted on to, is based on proxies, in particular estimates of temperature derived from studies of tree rings.

It has always, for me, been a case of Michael Mann comparing apples and oranges, or to put it another way sticking an apple on the end of a banana.

The Michael Mann and Shaun Marcott Hockey Sticks

Worst the grafting was necessary because the proxy record, i.e. the tree ring record, shows that global temperatures have declined since about 1960.

Of course we know that global temperature haven’t declined since 1960, or thereabout, so there must be something wrong with the proxy record. This is known as “the divergence problem” and it is a problem, because if tree rings are not a good indicator of global temperature after 1960, how can they be a good indicator of global temperature prior to 1960?

Indeed there doesn’t appear to be a reliable method for reconstructing the last 100 or so years based on the standard techniques used to reconstruct the last 2,000, 4,000 and even 11,000 years of global temperature.

So when someone claims the past 10 years have been hotter than the past 11,300 years, as the Australian Broadcasting Commission did recently [1], there is good reason to cringe.

Of course the ABC didn’t make it up. They were reporting on the work of climate scientists recently published in a reputable journal. In particular a paper by Shaun Marcott and colleagues published in Science [2].

Sceptic, mathematician and blogger, Steve McIntyre, broke the original hockey stick into bits to do a thorough analysis, showing that the entire shaft, not just post 1960, was a fancy construct to create the impression of runaway global warming [3], and he’s done the same with this new Marcott fabrication [2].

While some who read this blog may cringe at my use of the word fabrication, it is more than justified because as Dr Marcott now admits in his own words[4]:

“[T]he 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record.”

In summary, Dr Marcott created the perception of a spike in temperatures the same way Michael Mann did in that first hockey stick paper that featured so prominently in the third IPCC report, by comparing apples and oranges… or perhaps best described as grafting an apple onto the end of a banana.

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1. Earth on track to be hottest in human history: study . March 8, 2013
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-08/climate-study/4561164

2. A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Marcott et al.. Science, Volume 339, No. 6124, pages 1198-1201.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract

Abstract: Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (

3. see http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-ee-2005.pdf and more http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/ and the latest http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/

4. Response by Marcott et al. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/

Climategate 3: Thank you Mr FOIA

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SOMEONE hacked into the Climatic Research Unit, CRU, at the University of East Anglia and published thousands of confidential emails between leading climate scientists online in November 2009 [1]. Many of the emails showed that leading proponents of anthropogenic global warming were having great difficulty justifying their own propaganda. One of my favourite emails is from Kevin Trenberth, Head of Climate Analysis at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, to the infamous Michael Mann complaining that there has been no global warming:

“Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather)…

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

While the hack was widely condemned by mainstream climate scientists and the hacker would likely go to jail for a long time – if only he could be found. For me, the stolen emails represented a first opportunity to see the extraordinary deceit and corruption within the mainstream climate science community; the very people running the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, at the United Nations.

Indeed I have always held the hacker in high esteem. He is one of my heroes.   Along with Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), he is a great champion of science.

Anyway, yesterday the hacker provided several high profile bloggers, including Anthony Watts, with password access to some 220,000 additional emails!

WUWT will be publishing some of the new material over the next few days and probably also weeks and months [2].

In a covering email [3] the hacker explained he had done this because he was keen to off-load the remaining material and was not in a position to sort through the material and cull the sensitive and potentially socially damaging material:

“I prepared CG1 & 2 alone. Even skimming through all 220.000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment.
Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort. Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.”

I have often wondered who the hacker was, and what motivated him. In this latest email he provides significant insights. In particular, like many readers of this blog, he is clearly concerned about the increasing misallocation of resources by government in the name of anthropogenic global warming.

He is acutely aware that the opportunity for any one individual in a community to be fed, clothed and educated depends to a large extent on the collective wealth and wellbeing of that society. Towards this end, the covering email is also a plea for the better allocation of the “assets” at our collective disposal.

Mr FOIA, as he calls himself, wrote:

“Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Clearly Mr FOIA also places a premium on the truth, writing:

“Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.”

Thank you Mr FOIA.

 

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[1] All the emails, documents and computer code, from the original release in November 2009, can be downloaded from Wikileaks at 

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails,_data,_models,_1996-2009

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[2] I’m guessing that What’s Up With That will be a best place to find new emails as they are released. This morning the following was posted…

[Read more…] about Climategate 3: Thank you Mr FOIA