Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

What to Listen to, and Read, This Week

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1. How to die?

“If we remove faith from the equation, voluntary euthanasia presents a difficulty for the conservative dislike of change. In the broad sweep of Western history it is new, or at least newly popular, which means a conservative should regard it with suspicion. And yet often it follows on another new action that conservatives are happy to embrace – the extension of life through medicine, to the point where it becomes agonising. Why should one change be accepted and not the other?”

Read more here from Michael Duffy at Quadrant Online: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/02/simple-death
And look out for Michael’s new book ‘The Simple Death’.

2. Facebook

I’ve just been joined to a new Facebook group: Murray Darling Basin People Who Live in the Basin.  The group has been started by Peter Oataway a frustrated resident of the township of Hay on the Murrumbidgee River.    Are there other Facebook groups with an Australian rural focus?  If you know of one please provide the link as a comment.
 http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_188277774537703&id=188483771183770

3.  Blowering Dam Still Spilling  

Peter Oataway would like the Water Act changed so due consideration is given to rural communities in the Murray Darling Basin.   As Max Talbot wrote last week in The Land newspaper, the Act should also be changed to ensure the integration of Snowy Scheme water storages.  At the moment Snowy Hydro is still releasing from Lake Eucumbene and Blowering Dam is still spilling and as the hydrologists say: “a full dam doesn’t hold any water”.  More on this later in the week. 

4. Wind farming

I haven’t read: Why Wind Won’t Work?.  It’s a submission from the Carbon Sense Coalition to the Australian Senate Enquiry into Wind Farms.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/why-wind-wont-work.pdf and http://www.carbon-sense.com/ 
But I’m passing along the link on request from Viv Forbes.

5. Consider this an open thread

Let other readers of this blog know what you are listening to, and reading, this week by way of a comment.

And consider donating to the continued operation of this blog.   There is an orange button at the top right hand corner of this page.    It’s about community, and access to information that is not politically correct or even fashionable.

Thomas Kuhn on Novelty and Expectation

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The Harvard trained physicist and famous philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, often refers to a psychological experiment in his book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ whereby individuals fail to notice individual anomalous cards within a deck.   

The experiment illustrates the extent to which people can struggle when they are confronted with information that does not accord with what they have been taught. 

Kuhn suggests the experiment demonstrates the nature of the mind and also the process of scientific discovery. 

He has written:

‘In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.’

[Read more…] about Thomas Kuhn on Novelty and Expectation

Tim Flannery’s Failings Ignored

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‘The Government says it wants a “climate expert” to sell the message to the public, and who do they pick? A small mammal expert whose predictions on the climate are so wrong any normal person would slink off in shame. But not Flannery, the Teflon prophet, reality doesn’t stick to him.  How can it be that the outrageously wrong get away with it with reputations intact (and get rewarded too)? Blame the mainstream media. Blame also a government that thinks it’s a good use of public money to promote known failures.

[Read more…] about Tim Flannery’s Failings Ignored

More on the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation: A Note from Martin Hertzberg

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‘There is an important point that was missed in your article about the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Applying the argument to the “greenhouse gas” theory is quite simple: there can be no “back radiation” from the colder atmosphere to the warmer earth’s surface.  It violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as it applies to radiative transfer…’

More following from Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a coauthor of “Slaying the Sky Dragon-Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory”…

‘Consider two flat, parallel surfaces each with unit emissivity facing each other. One surface is maintained at a higher temperature, Th while the other surface is maintained at a lower temperature Tc . If the hotter surface were facing a complete void or surroundings at 0 K, the flux of radiant energy that it would emit and that the void would receive is sTh4.

‘Similarly, if the colder surface were facing a complete void or surroundings at 0 K, the flux of radiant energy that it would emit and that the void would receive is sTc4. But neither of the surfaces is facing a void: they are facing each other, and accordingly the net flux of radiant energy in the field between them is:

                             I (net) = s (Th4 – Tc4 ) ,

and is always from the hotter surface to the colder surface as required by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

‘Nowhere in the radiation field between the two surfaces is the flux of radiant energy equal to what either of the surfaces would emit if they were facing a complete void at 0 K! Thus, the simple use of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to characterize the emission from a source of radiation as though it depends only on the temperature of the source without considering the temperature of the surroundings that are receiving the radiation, is a misuse of the equation, and the notion that a colder source can transfer radiant energy to a warmer object involves not only a misuse of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation but also a violation of the 2nd Law.   

‘The situation is analogous to a simple problem in mechanics.  A 1 Kg mass is sitting on a frictionless table and is subjected to a force of 10 Newtons from left to right and simultaneously subjected to a force of 7 Newtons from right to left. Now you are free to calculate what the motion would be if only the 10 Newton force acted on the mass, or if you prefer, you can calculate what the motion would be if only the 7 Newton mass operated on it. But, of course, neither of those calculations describes the real motion, which is that of a 3 Newton force acting from left to right. There is no motion to the left from the weaker force.     

‘Thus it should be quite clear that the simple use of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation as though it can characterize the radiant energy being transferred from a source to its surroundings without any reference to the conditions of the surroundings that are receiving that radiant energy, is a misuse of the equation.’

Dr. Martin Hertzberg coauthor of  Slaying the Sky Dragon-Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory

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Part 1 on the Equation:  https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/2011/02/a-note-on-the-stefan-boltzman-equation/

The Dragon book:  http://slayingtheskydragon.com/

Apologies in advance: The equations inserted into the above texts appear to be displaying OK as posted – using internet explorer as my browser.   But I have had problems before with mathematics in blogs displaying properly – so apologies in advance if they aren’t looking right.

Parliament to Finally Admit Water Act Unbalanced?

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On the pages of The Australian Financial Review on November 16, 2010, Sydney barrister Jospehine Kelly wrote that:

“No one in federal Parliament is being honest with the people of the Murray-Darling basin and the Australian pubilc.  The Water Act puts the environment first when allocating water to the basin. 

“Social and economic considerations are not relevant to deciding how much water the environment needs.  Water available for human use is what is left…”

Today Senator Barnaby Joyce forced a Senate inquiry into the Water Act with the support of independents Senator Fielding and Senator Xenophon.  The inquiry is to determine whether in fact the Act does provide an equal balance between economic, social and environmental factors – or not.

[Read more…] about Parliament to Finally Admit Water Act Unbalanced?

Looking for AGW in a Sea of Natural Variability: Declining Rainfall in SW Western Australia (Part 2) – A Note from Luke Walker

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Finding anthropogenic global warming (AGW) shapes in the fog of variability is a major challenge, simply because natural climate variability is large.  And then the problem becomes attributing those changes to a climate mechanism in an interlinked dynamic climate system.

One of those climate detective stories taking some intriguing twists and turns is the rainfall decline in Western Australia which has been the impetus for the Indian Ocean Climate Initiative (IOCI).  Their web site explains:
“In southwest WA, a drying trend has been observed …  The rainfall decline has been most apparent in late autumn and early winter, with a major drop in rainfall totals occurring in the 1970s, and possibly another more recently in the 1990s.  Averaged across southwest WA, a step decrease in total annual rainfall of almost 10% was seen in the mid-1970s, though individual locations would have experienced a greater decrease.”

[Read more…] about Looking for AGW in a Sea of Natural Variability: Declining Rainfall in SW Western Australia (Part 2) – A Note from Luke Walker