Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Forget the Earth, Now We are Killing the Universe

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Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too.

The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.

Sounds like a job for the UN Intergalactic Panel on Cosmological Change.

The Telegraph: Mankind ‘shortening the universe’s life’

Lesser Sooty Owl

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Lesser Sooty Owl.jpg

The piercing, descending shriek of the Lesser Sooty Owl Tyto multipunctata sounds much like a falling bomb, without the explosion at the end. It has enormous eyes and exceptional hearing, allowing it to hunt in almost total darkness.

It is a formidable rainforest predator of almost all the creatures I have posted at this weblog over the past few years.

Formerly classified as a sub-species of the much larger and darker Sooty Owl Tyto tenebricosa, it has since been re-classified into a distinct species that is endemic to Australia.

Some Time by the Murray River

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I have enjoyed spending the last couple of weeks living on a bank of the Murray River just upstream of Barham.

The bird life is especially amazing with wood ducks in the river, white ibis, sulphur-crested cockatoos and galahs on the lawn, superb blue wrens in the bush outside my office window, swift parrots in the red gums and very black ravens drinking out of the bird bath.

I saw a lot of black swans when I visited the salt evaporation ponds at Wakool. I saw a shag in the Gunbower Forest. There were two pelicans at the Toorrumbarry Weir.

Pelicans ver 2 (copy Redgum 113).jpg
Just downstream of the Toorumbarry Weir, November 6, 2007

I have started most days with a large glass of Murray River water and on the best days finish with a swim in the river.

While many of the forests, tributaries and anabranches in this Murray Valley section of the long Murray River are suffering from a lack of water, the river itself is running strongly with releases from Hume Dam at the top of the system destined for South Australia at the other end.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I’m off to Sydney.

Thanks Faye and Ken for your hospitality! And Daryl, I took photographs at Riverdale this morning which I will post at this blog in the next week or two with comment from the MDBC report.

2000 Years of Global Temperatures

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Loehle-2007-plus-HadCRUT3.gif

Roy Spencer has taken Craig Loehle’s 2000 year temperature reconstruction to 1995 and added the HadCRUT3 to 2007. Obviously, the proxy temperature reconstructions during the Medieval Warm Period would have larger error bars than the current (instrumental) temperatures, so one shouldn’t put too much emphasis on small differences between the current peak and the MWP peaks.

Roy Spencer also looked at what the HadCRUT3 trace would look like if temperatures now remained constant for another 15 years (until 2022)…in that case, the temperature trace almost reaches the +0.6 deg C line (just barely
exceeding the warmest MWP peak).

We can clearly see that the coldest part of the Little Ice Age was unprecedented in the past 2000 years, and the subsequent recovery to the Modern Warm Period.

Does the King Have No Clothes or ‘The Wrong Trousers?’

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Just in case no-one noticed, the IPCC finally dropped the façade of being a scientific rather than a political body following the publication of the Synthesis Report. The IPCC now stands naked behind the Kyoto Protocol as the policy needed to avoid a computer modelled CO2 driven climate catastrophe.

Meanwhile, the report seems to have had a profound effect on UK prime minister Gordon Brown. Despite being previously advised that the UK could not meet the EU target of 20% of energy coming from renewables by 2020, he now intends to set a much higher target. Furthermore, he seems poised to replace the draft climate change bill target of a 60% reduction in the UKs CO2 emissions by 2050 with an 80% target. Details of any strategy designed to achieve such ambitious targets so far seem to be limited to the desire to seek the end of the single use plastic bag and the setting up of a ‘green hotline’ to advise people how to reduce their environmental impact. He also claims that there will be hundreds of thousands of ‘green jobs’ created, with no mention of how many may be lost.

Enter Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner to point out that Kyoto is ‘The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy’

Executive Summary
We face a problem of anthropogenic climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 has failed to tackle it. A child of summits, it was doomed from the beginning, because of the way that it came into being, Kyoto has given only an illusion of action. It has become the sole focus of our efforts, and, as a result, we have wasted fifteen years.
We have called this essay “The Wrong Trousers” evoking the Oscar-winning animated film of that name. In that film, the hapless hero, Wallace, becomes trapped in a pair of automated ‘Techno Trousers’. Whereas he thought they would make his life easier, in fact, they take control and carry him off in directions he does not wish to go.
We evoke this image to suggest how the Kyoto Protocol has also marched us involuntarily to unintended and unwelcome places. Just as the enticingly electro-mechanical “Techno Trousers” offered the prospect of hugely increasing the wearer’s power and stride, so successful international treaties leverage the power of signatory states in a similar way, making possible together what cannot be achieved alone. The Kyoto Wrong Trousers have done something similar to those who fashioned and subscribed to the agreement. To set a new course, we need to understand how we have gone wrong so far. Accordingly, the essay proceeds in three sections, as follows:

Continue reading the entire essay.