Looks as though I managed to spell Kangaroo correctly this time. Could this help Rudd ‘save the planet,’ even though atmospheric Methane levels are stable or falling?
Australian scientists are trying to give kangaroo-style stomachs to cattle and sheep in a bid to cut the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, researchers say – SYDNEY (AFP)
Eco-friendly kangaroo farts could help global warming: scientists
Dr David Whitehouse is an astronomer and author of ‘The Sun: A Biography’ (John Wiley, 2004). He has written an article for The Independent, normally the home of hype and alarmism about the small, diminishing logarithmic effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on our ever changing climate, entitled ‘Ray of hope: Can the sun save us from global warming?’
Something is happening to our Sun. It has to do with sunspots, or rather the activity cycle their coming and going signifies. After a period of exceptionally high activity in the 20th century, our Sun has suddenly gone exceptionally quiet. Months have passed with no spots visible on its disc. We are at the end of one cycle of activity and astronomers are waiting for the sunspots to return and mark the start of the next, the so-called cycle 24. They have been waiting for a while now with no sign it’s on its way any time soon.
Read the rest of the article from The Independent, 5th December, here.
Also, see SolarCycle24.com
Seasons of the Sun
Modern Solar Minimum
(2000-?)
Modern Climate Optimum
(1890–2000) – the world is getting warmer. Concentrations of greenhouse gas increase. Solar activity increases.
Dalton Solar Minimum
(1790–1820) – global temperatures are lower than average.
Maunder Solar Minimum
(1645–1715) – coincident with the ‘Little Ice Age’.
Spörer Solar Minimum
(1420-1530) – discovered by the analysis of radioactive carbon in tree rings that correlate with solar activity – colder weather. Greenland settlements abandoned.
Wolf Solar Minimum
(1280–1340) – climate deterioration begins. Life gets harder in Greenland.
Medieval Solar Maximum
(1075–1240) – coincides with Medieval Warm Period. Vikings from Norway and Iceland found settlements in Greenland and North America.
Oort Solar Minimum
(1010-1050) – temperature on Earth is colder than average.
There seem to have been 18 sunspot minima periods in the last 8,000 years; studies indicate that the Sun currently spends up to a quarter of its time in these minima.
In what has been described as an important victory, Ecotourism Australia has been granted a number of interlocutory court orders by the Queensland Supreme Court, to protect both intellectual property and also the public from potentially misleading environmental marketing.
Ecotourism Australia found that an uncertified operator was using its ECO Certification Logo, without permission. The Eco Certification Program provides accreditation to successful eco and nature tourism applicants in Australia and is now being exported as the International Ecotourism Standard.
The Bali climate conference has inevitably put Indonesia under the media spotlight. The conference itself is not the only story deemed to be newsworthy:
Indonesian scientists say many of Indonesia’s islands may be swallowed up by the sea if world leaders fail to find a way to halt rising sea levels.
Doomsayers take this dire warning by Indonesian scientists a step further and predict that by 2035, the Indonesian capital’s airport will be flooded by sea water and rendered useless. (That might put an end to Indonesia as a climate conference venue).
Read the rest of the Yahoo news article ‘Global warming may threaten Indonesia’
The following story made the ITN News in the UK and ABC News online in Australia (Thanks Luke):
Because of illegal logging, the climate conference host, Indonesia, is losing an area of forest the size of a soccer field every 10 seconds. Most threatened are the peatlands of Kalimantan and the orangutans which call them home.
This is what they’re making way for – palm oil plantations. Chasing a boom in demand for biofuels and along the way, killing up to 50 orangutans a week.
The unintended consequences of CO2 hysteria.
Watch the video report here or read the transcript here, from ABC’s usual perspective.
In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, Pat Michaels and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the global temperature graph showing warming is an exaggeration, at least in the past few decades. Along the way I have also found that the UN agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of their data. The graph comes from data collected in weather stations around the world. Other graphs come from weather satellites and from networks of weather balloons that monitor layers of the atmosphere. These other graphs didn’t show as much warming as the weather station data, even though they measure at heights where there is supposed to be even more greenhouse gas-induced warming than at the surface. The discrepancy is especially clear in the tropics.
The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data are collected has changed. Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather station records, and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, more than half the world’s weather stations were closed in a four year span, which means that we can’t really compare today’s average to that from the 1980s. Read a background summary here and a technical paper published in the JGR December 2007 here.
The Abstract states:
Local land surface modification and variations in data quality affect temperature trends in
surface-measured data. Such effects are considered extraneous for the purpose of
measuring climate change, and providers of climate data must develop adjustments to
filter them out. If done correctly, temperature trends in climate data should be
uncorrelated with socioeconomic variables that determine these extraneous factors. This
hypothesis can be tested, which is the main aim of this paper. Using a new data base for
all available land-based grid cells around the world we test the null hypothesis that the
spatial pattern of temperature trends in a widely-used gridded climate data set is
independent of socioeconomic determinants of surface processes and data
inhomogeneities. The hypothesis is strongly rejected (P= 14 7.1 10− × ), indicating that
extraneous (nonclimatic) signals contaminate gridded climate data. The patterns of
contamination are detectable in both rich and poor countries, and are relatively stronger in
countries where real income is growing. We apply a battery of model specification tests to
rule out spurious correlations and endogeneity bias. We conclude that the data
contamination likely leads to an overstatement of actual trends over land. Using the
regression model to filter the extraneous, nonclimatic effects reduces the estimated 1980-
2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half.
According to Zoie Jones of ABC News, University of Western Sydney Researcher, Sarah James has found that attitudes to climbing Uluru have changed, and the time might be right to close the climb altogether.
Interesting that it has taken so long to come to such a reckoning, when Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park became only the second property in the world to be listed as a cultural landscape in 1994.
Australia nominated the property in recognition of its cultural heritage importance and committed to manage those values in accordance with its international obligations as defined within the World Heritage Convention.
The fact that it has showcased for the world its reluctance to prohibit climbing, despite World Heritage obligations and also the stated wishes of the traditional owners, is indisputable.
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.
Read more