Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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2006, Not That Dry Here in Australia

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During 2006 much was said and written about the “extraordinary drought” conditions here in Australia being a consequence of climate change.

I wrote various pieces suggesting that when all the data was in, rainfall for this last year, even for the Murray Darling Basin, would be within the realms of natural variability.

Well the data is now all in and here’s the rainfall graph for the Murray Darling Basin:

rainfall06_bom_summary.JPG.

The Bureau of Meterology has also just published a summary for last year for rainfall with comment that:

“Preliminary data indicate that the average total rainfall throughout Australia for 2006 was about 490 mm, slightly more than the long-term average of 472 mm. However, it is unlikely that many Australians will remember 2006 as a wet year.

The near-normal all-Australian total was made up of well above average totals across the north and inland Western Australia cancelling out the well below average totals recorded in the southeast and far southwest.

Parts of southeast Australia experienced their driest year on record, including key catchment areas which feed the Murray and Snowy Rivers, as did parts of the Western Australian coast, including Perth. In contrast, record high falls were observed in parts of the tropics and inland Western Australia. It was the third-driest year on record for both Victoria and Tasmania, while for the broader southeast Australian region, which also takes in southeast South Australia and southern New South Wales, it was the second-driest.”

Here’s the graph from the Bureau’s report:

rainfall06_bom_austsummaryb.JPG

2006, Not That Hot Here in Australia

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I’ve previously described 2006 as the year of climate change hysteria , but interestingly at least in Australia it wasn’t that warm.

While 2005 was the hottest on record, according to ABC Online quoting from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology last year, 2006, was the 9th warmest on record.

I’ve just received the report by email from the Bureau (7.30am, 3rd January) and they are now claiming last year was only the 11th warmest on record.

Here is the graph:

temp06_bom.JPG

The report says:

“Data collected by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate that Australia’s annual mean temperature for 2006 was 0.47°C above the standard 1961-1990 average, making it the eleventh warmest year since comparable temperature observations became available in 1910.

“Despite record warm daytime temperatures in the drought-affected southeast, 2006 was cooler than the previous year when averaged across the whole country. This was largely due to a very active tropical wet season early in the year resulting in cooler temperatures through the north, and clear skies and low soil moisture associated with the drought resulting in cold overnight temperatures from April to July. The annual mean maximum temperature was 0.60°C above average (ninth highest), while the mean minimum temperature was 0.34°C above average (seventeenth highest). Temperature anomalies varied throughout the year but spring 2006 was particularly warm (+1.42°C), being Australia’s warmest spring season on record.”

And the 9 warmest years span an appromiate 26 year period.
That would mean last year was about the coolest year that we have had in Australia for about 26 years.

The full report is apparently due out tomorrow. I will update this post once it is available online at the Bureau.

New Year’s Eve

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It’s 31st December 2006, a time for reflection and perhaps also New Year’s resolutions.

This time last year I wrote: “A CNN/TIME survey of Asia-Pacific countries reports that avian flu is expected to be the biggest global issue in 2006, followed by economic slowdown and terrorism. What happened to global warming? Why didn’t it rate a mention in the survey?”

I reckon global warming did emerge as the biggest global issue with Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ galvanized support for the idea that carbon dioxide is the cause of every climate crisis.

I did a series of blog posts on the movie, most of them are listed here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/faq.php?id=15&category=18 .

Along with ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, many environmentalists were consumed lamenting the fate of the world’s polar bears and minke whales (neither species likely to go extinct anytime soon) while a species of freshwater dolphin in the Yangtze did go extinct. As I wrote for the IPA Review in September, the extinction of the baiji has taken place at a time of unprecedented interest and concern for their large relative, the minke whale.

In May 2006, Ross Coulthart from Channel 9’s Sunday Program revealed some of the claims being used to support calls for billions of dollars to be spent on fixing a “looming salinity crisis” in the Murray River are simply not true: “Salinity is a problem. But it seems nowhere as bad as we’ve been told by environmental groups, government departments and many in the media.” Ross Coulthart began to research the issue after reading my monograph written in December 2003: ‘Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’.

Next year the Murray River may run dry, and my home town of Brisbane will vote on whether or not we are prepared to drink recycled water, while the the sun might save us from global warming.

Next year I will be part of a new research group at the University of Queensland with funding available for 4 PhD scholarships to undertake evidence-based research into environmental issues with the aim of providing improved information and frameworks for prioritizing environmental need, quantifying the costs and benefits of conservation initiatives, developing agricultural policies and appropriate legal frameworks.

I’ve no resolutions for the New Year. But I am going to wish that the drought would break across southern Australia, that the bans on GM food crops are lifted and that more trees are cut down in Australian forests because trees are a renewable resource that sequest carbon and we shouldn’t be importing timber from south east Asia when we have so much forest in Australia. I will also hope for more controlled burning in state forests and national parks for the koalas. I also hope that more water gets through to the Macquarie Marsh nature reserve and here’s a list of my blog posts over the last year on this issue: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/faq.php?id=14&category=17 .

I also hope that David Hicks is released from prison in Guantanamo Bay, Richard Ness doesn’t go to prison in Indonesia, and that there is justice in the case of the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee in Queensland, Australia.

As regards this blog, I’m going to borrow from a recent post by Jim and endorse the following rules for 2007:
1. Assume good faith from your opponent – until bad faith is demonstrated
2. Address only the argument – it is very possible that a scientist paid by Exxon (or the IPA) might be an honorable, diligent and would never compromise their integrity by advancing a proposition they knew to be false. It is equally possible that well credentialed scientists may exaggerate, cherry-pick, offer up scary scenarios etcetera because of a messianic belief in their mission to save the world from evil. In short, it’s almost impossible to be certain about motivation so speculation is fruitless.
3. Acknowledge the deficiencies in your position – pretending your argument is self evidently correct and beyond doubt when it clearly isn’t is dishonest and arrogant.
And to Jim’s three I’m going to add one from Steven Pinker:
4. Acknowledge that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to this blog over the last year. Here are two guest blog posts worth re-reading:

A crusading journalist is one who closes one eye in order to see better with the other by Roger Underwood: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001633.html

and also,

Paul Williams explains the pines may be a better proxy for carbon dioxide (CO2) than temperature, so the famous hockey stick graph may not be a ‘temperature hockey stick’, but rather a ‘CO2 Hockey Stick’: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001546.html.

My best wishes to YOU for 2007.

The Discoveries of Science: Comment from Steven Pinker

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David Tribe sent me a link to a piece by Steven Pinker titled ‘Less Faith, More Reason’. Here’s an extract:

“Missing from the report is a sensitivity to the ennobling nature of knowledge: to the inherent value, with consequences too far-reaching to enumerate, of understanding how the world works. For one thing, it is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life.

I believe we have a responsibility to nurture and perpetuate this knowledge for the same reason that we have a responsibility to perpetuate an appreciation of great accomplishments in the arts. A failure to do so would be a display of disrespect for our ancestors and heirs, and a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements that the human mind is capable of.

Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

I believe that a person for whom this understanding is not second-nature cannot be said to be educated. And I think that some acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge should be a goal of the general education requirement and a stated value of a university.”

You can read the complete article here: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515314 .

Ice Shelf Becomes Sea Ice: Perhaps Good News for Polar Bears?

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Two days ago the mainstream media was lamenting that polar bears should be listed as threatened with extinction because of disappearing sea ice all a consequence of global warming.

Today the media is reporting that a giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic and has formed an ice island. Furthermore, this ice island is likely to end up as sea ice in the very places scientists are complaining there is not enough of the stuff for the big bears…

“Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few kilometres offshore. It travelled west for 50 kilometres until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early northern winter… Prevailing winds could then send the ice island southwards, deep into the Beaufort Sea.”

Well isn’t this good news for polar bears?

It could be, if there was any truth to the story that polar bears are threatened with extinction from a reduced area of sea ice.

But the whole “disappearing sea ice threatens polar bear’s survival” story is in reality a farce.

While the area of sea ice has been declining over the last couple of decades, the number of polar bears has actually been increasing. That’s right increasing!

So it is very wrong for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to uncritically report that: “The World Wide Fund for Nature says the declining number of polar bears is a major warning on the impact of climate change.”

There were only about 5,000 polar bears in 1970, numbers depressed by hunting. There are now about 25,000 polar bears. The increase a consequence of agreements to restrict hunting under quota systems.

The biggest threat to discrete populations of polar bears continues to be illegal hunting in places like the Chukchi sea and Greenland’s failure to agree to the quota system.

If the extent of sea ice continues to decline in places like Hudson Bay and the Beaufort Sea, these populations of polar bears can move north to where there is more sea ice with ringed seals, or they might simply switch to hunting seals that prefer warmer weather.

As I have previously written, the two polar bears living happily at Sea World, on Queensland’s Gold Coast, enjoying watermelons and museli bars, are evidence of the capacity of this big bear to adapt, including to warm weather.

——————
The mass of ice fell away 16 months ago but scientists have ony just realised because it all happened at a remote locality off the coast of Ellesmere Island which is about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole.

The issue of environmentalists and scientists taking advantage of the popularity of polar bears and drawing rediculous conclusions from the available data all to progress their global warming agenda is reviewed in a piece I wrote for the IPA Review earlier this year entitled ‘Polar Bear Politics: Underestimating the survival capacity of one popular bear’.

There is an old blog post from 25th October 2005 here (Polar Bears on Thin Ice) and another from 3rd May 2006 here ( 16,119 Species Threatened with Extinction?) and I also wrote something on 30th May 2006 here (Polar Bear Politcs: Misrepresenting the Nature of One Smart Bear).

www.whalephoto.com

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Congratulations to whale and wildlife photographer, George McCallum. His revamped website is back online with a thousand or so images including of minke whales, humpback whales and killer whales:

http://www.whalephoto.com .

The website includes albums on ‘European birds’, ‘oil platforms and rigs’, and also one entitled ‘weather and water’:

http://www.whalephoto.com/2007/thumbnails.php?album=24.

For more information on George: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001650.html.

wb0845b.jpg
www.whalephoto.com