The money issue, Mr den Blanken said, had overshadowed other elements of the meeting’s final communiqué that environmentalists should applaud – including a commitment to create a global carbon trading market. Read more here.
Opinion
Need Floor-Price for Carbon?
A shake-up in the way the “boom and bust” carbon markets are working in Europe is being urged ahead of tomorrow’s auction of new emission certificates by the UK government. Read more here.
Victorian Bushfires: The Result of Human Folly
THE catastrophic bushfires in Victoria this year, and the other great fires of recent years in Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT and South Australia are dramatic expressions not just of killing forces unleashed, but of human folly… I am well aware of the drought, of the terrible conditions on the days of the fires, and of the view from some quarters that all of this is a result of global warming. I accept that drought and bad fire weather increase the risk of serious bushfires. What I do not accept is that “unstoppable” bushfires are the inevitable consequence. And while I will always welcome improved firefighting technology, I know from experience and from an understanding of the simple physics of bushfire behaviour, that technology can never be a substitute for good land management.
I am quoting from a paper given by Roger Underwood to the Stretton Group in Melbourne recently.
[Read more…] about Victorian Bushfires: The Result of Human Folly
A General Morality Model?
‘It is interesting to note that the authority of climate science has come to include moral issues so that these scientists can now assert unequivocally that “climate change is the moral issue of our time”. Presumably, this too is based on modelling, a General Morality Model perhaps. One wonders what values they use for their lying and exaggerating parameters.’ Walter Starck.
The Ocean Really is Cooling
THERE are 3,000 free-drifting buoys in the world’s ocean; first deployed in the year 2000 they allow continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean.
There has though been some difficulty in interpreting the data from these buoys. Initial signs of cooling were dismissed as due to technical errors subsequently corrected based on a small sample of the 3,000 buoys known as profiling floats.
Craig Loehle has analysed the data from only the profiling floats for ocean heat content from 2003 to 2008. In a paper recently published in the journal Energy and Environment he has concluded that there has been ocean cooling over this period.
This graphic is from figure 1 of the technical paper and shows the decline in ocean heat content (x1022J) smoothed with a 1-2-1 filter.
Dr Loehle’s findings are consistent with satellite and surface instrumental records that do not showing a warming trend over recent years.
West Antarctica To Collapse Again – But Not Soon
CLIMATE change has always been driven by the sun, the earth’s orbit and plate tectonics, at least that is what many so-called sceptic would argue.
In a new paper in this week’s journal Nature Tim Naish and colleagues conclude that there is a relationship between the past collapse of West Antarctic ice shelf and the earth’s orbit. In the same issue of Nature there is an article by David Pollard who, with Robert De Conto, ran a five-million-year computer simulation of the ice sheet and concluded that if surrounding waters increase by 5 degrees Celsius, it could melt in one thousand years or so.
[Read more…] about West Antarctica To Collapse Again – But Not Soon
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.