Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

Indonesia’s Climate Follows the Sun

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CARBON dioxide is not an air pollutant. It is plant food. All life on Earth depends on it. It is natural. It forms the bubbles in bread, champagne, and Coca-Cola. You breathe it out, and plants breathe it in.

The Earth contains a lot of CO2, but the atmosphere contains so little that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rightly calls CO2 a “trace gas”. A scientific mystery is why the air does not hold more CO2 than it does. Half a billion years ago, there was almost 20 times today’s CO2 concentration.

Most farmers would prefer to grow crops under much-higher concentrations of CO2 than today’s 385 parts per million—less than 1/25 of 1 percent of the atmosphere. To feed the world, low CO2 concentration is not such a great idea. High concentrations are better, and they cause no harm. Experiments have shown that even delicate plants such as orchids thrive at CO2 concentrations of 10,000 ppm.

That is why U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia has declared that if CO2 is to be labeled an “air pollutant”, then so must Frisbees and flatulence.

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Earliest Temperature Records from Near the North Pole (Subarctic Temperatures Part 1)

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IT is generally agreed that there has been some global warming over the last 100 or so years and that this has been most pronounced in the Arctic – at the North Pole. 

There is temperature data for Hudson Bay in central Canada – not at the North Pole, or within the Arctic Circle, but nevertheless a long way north – back to 1768.  

In 1768 two astronomers from the Royal Society were sent to observe the transit of Venus at Hudson Bay (see Instrumental Temperature Records at Two Sites in Central Canada: 1768 to 1910.  Timothy Ball and Roger Kingsley, Climate Change, Vol 6. pgs 39-56. ).  

At the late John Daly’s website, Miceal O’Ronain has plotted this very early record, and subsequent records from the Hudson’s Bay Company, with data from the modern weather station at Churchill to 2002.

The earlier records suggest great variation in the temperature in the nineteenth century, but this may be an artefact of how it was measured.  The upswing at the very end of the twentieth century is probably real and corresponds with the present period of decline in the extent of sea ice at the Arctic particularly in summer.

[Click on the chart for a larger and much clearer view.]
 

 

 

The Absurdity of a Reliable Average Global Surface Temperature

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ACCURATELY recording the temperature of a body that is not in equilibrium can be complicated.  Recording the average surface temperature of the earth reliably, and with such accuracy that one can know with certainty that there has been a less than one degree Celsius change over one hundred years, probably impossible. 

Dr Vincent Gray explains why, and begins at the very beginning with an explanation of “temperature” and how it is measured:

TEMPERATURE is one of the six basic units of the SI (Metric) system, but is the least understood  and most mysterious of all of them.

It originally arose as a method of assessing heat level, which could be measured by the change in length of a liquid inside a glass capillary. The scale was divided into a number of equal units between “fixed” points.

In 1724, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit chose three fixed points. Zero was the temperature of a mixture of ice, water and ammonium chloride, which he considered to represent the lowest possible temperature on the earth’s surface (he was wrong). Then he chose the melting point of ice as 32 degrees, which meant the boiling point of water was 212 degrees. It is amazing that this cumbersome and inconvenient system survived for so long, and is still used in the USA.

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Global Warming: Sweden to Gain Economically

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SWEDEN is, like Australia, experiencing the effects of an upward trend in temperatures that by some has been attributed to the recorded increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. However, Sweden unlike Australia is likely to gain economically from global warming.

Sweden has been in the forefront of implementing energy efficient building standards borne out of necessity. Swedes have always favoured smaller four cylinder cars with heated front and passengers seats, a feature which you learn to appreciate during the winter months. The winters in Northern Sweden are fierce with sub zero temperatures for months on end and very little if any daylight.

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Aussie Farmers: Not Beaten by Salt, But Drought and Government Policies

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REMEMBER the stories about how the Murray Darling Basin, the food bowl of Australia, was going to be lost to salt?  Headline after media headline told of imminent ruin from rising water tables bring salt.  

The Riverina, a once rich farming area in south western New South Wales, was considered most affected by this “scourge of salinity”, this “curse of salt”.  

In the next year it is likely that a lot of farmers in this area will walk, will leave the Riverina, but it won’t be because of salt.  Farmers in the Riverina worked with their local water corporation, Murray Irrigation Limited (MIL), and government engineers to solve the salt problem. 

While it was once feared over 300,000 hectares would be lost to salt, by March 2003 the area with shallow water tables had stabilized below 20,000 hectares and is now less than 4,000 hectares. 

Indeed farmers won’t be leaving because of salt.  They will be leaving because of prolonged drought, and government policy. 

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Don’t Ditch Cattle Yet, Science Isn’t ‘Settled’

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HOW many times have you heard it said, the science is settled, we will have catastrophic global warming unless we change our ways and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?  

While the “science might be settled” it does not seem to be well understood.  

At least there has been a dramatic rise in key greenhouse gases in the past last two years, in particular methane, but temperatures have not gone up. 

In fact, global temperatures are falling.  That’s right – falling.

While Australian farmers have been told they should make a transition from cows to kangaroos to reduce their greenhouse gas emission, in particular emissions of methane, it is increasingly unclear that such a dramatic action, even if it was undertaken, would have any effect on global methane levels. [Read more…] about Don’t Ditch Cattle Yet, Science Isn’t ‘Settled’