Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Close Encounter of the Cassowary Kind

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CassChick1a.jpg

Breakfast at Cooper Creek Wilderness took a dramatic turn this morning with the unexpected arrival of a distressed cassowary chick. Not more than a month old, its separation from its family unit was cause for great concern. It ran about whistling for its father, but without response.

The image (above) shows the striped pattern providing a degree of concealment amongst the forest ground-cover. The second image shows the young cassowary, standing on our concrete verandah. After taking the shot, the chick then moved into the kitchen, which has no doors and then onwards to explore other aspects of our dwelling.

Perhaps ten minutes after its arrival, the dad made its presence known with another two chicks in tow. Re-united, the family walked quietly off into the wilderness, allowing our own kids to re-focus on readying themselves for the start of school’s third term.

CassChick2.jpg

Has Lord Peter Lost His Tools: A Note from Davey

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England has produced a number of outstanding detective story writers. Agatha Christie comes to mind with her character Hercule Poirot. Another is Dorothy L. Sayers, with her diffident, yet steely-minded toff, Lord Peter Wimsey.

There were also other sides to Dorothy. She was a moderate feminist, and one of the first women to graduate from Oxford University. She was a reputable medieval scholar.

In 1947 she delivered a talk at Oxford University called ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’, in which she suggested that western education has lost its way, by trying to cram in facts, rather than first developing skills. She pointed to the medieval trivium as a good way of giving students the ‘tools of learning’, namely logic (to think clearly), grammar (to write and speak clearly), and rhetoric (to mount a persuasive argument).

We see plenty of environmental rhetoric on this blog site, but is it all logical? Is there too much quoting of ‘facts’ (some might say ‘factoids’), and not enough sound argument? Is the use of scientific jargon and acronyms intended to obfuscate or impress, rather than to seek the truth? Should not all ‘models’ be accompanied by a clearly written statement of their assumptions?

In my view Dorothy’s argument was valid in 1947, and is even more valid now. She also wrote it up as an essay, which is available at several websites. Search on (sayers tools trivium). Have a read – it’s only a few pages.

Dr. David Naugle (search on naugle trivium sayers) has reviewed her essay, and the benefits of the trivium have been discussed elsewhere, for example in the book ‘Chaucer and the Trivium:The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales’, by J. Stephen Russell.

I suggest that the humanities, and the medieval trivium, have a great deal to offer in current political and environmental debate. It might help people to cope with the torrent of ‘news’, advertising, and ‘spin doctoring’. Any comments?

Green and Medieval Davey Gam Esq.
Perth, Western Australia

Say No to Emissions Trading: Art Raiche

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It is foolish beyond measure to enter into an Emissions Trading System (ETS) based on the hysterical predictions of CSIRO’s computer modelling. To quote Prof Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the world’s most eminent physicists: “The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”

If there is global consensus that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing global warming, why is it that over 30,000 US scientists disagree and have petitioned the US government against actions to mitigate CO2 emissions? See http://www.petitionproject.org/

Why have the oceans been cooling for 5 years? Why is Antarctic sea ice increasing?

Why is it that despite the past decade of increased CO2 emission levels, the temperature has been stable and is predicted by the Hadley Centre to actually go down over the next decade?

We need to think very carefully before following the recommendations of the Garnaut Report, possibly the longest economic suicide note in Australia’s history.

Art Raiche
Killara, NSW

Rainforest Cancer Cure One Step Closer

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Dr Paul Reddell, co-founder Dr Victoria Gordon and the EcoBiotics team, have discovered a rainforest plant that produces a possible cancer-fighting molecule.

Clinical trials of a previously untreatable type of cancer in horses have produced dramatic results: “The cancers were the size of a tennis ball to begin and following the injection of this drug have shrunk, died and then fallen out. Finally the skin around the tumour area has healed.”

As originally reported in the Cairns Post, Dr. Reddell said, “We are now looking to move the drug to testing against obstructive tumours and skin cancers in humans.”

Bio-discovery is emerging as an increasingly important and value-added attribute of bio-diversity, with important economic implications for conservation. In 2004, following the Commonwealth Government’s ratification of the ‘Convention on Biological Diversity’, the Queensland Government enacted its Bio-discovery Act, to facilitate access by biodiscovery entities to minimal quantities of native biological resources on or in State land or Queensland waters, to encourage the development, in the State, of value added biodiscovery and to ensure the State, for the benefit of all persons in the State, obtains a fair and equitable share in the benefits of biodiscovery..

Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered

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Physics and Society, in its July 2008 quarterly edition, has published a paper by Christopher Monckton entitled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, which exposes the IPCC’s strange method of calculating the effect of CO2 on temperature and suggests that in response to a CO2 doubling global temperature may rise by as little as 0.6 C.

Abstract:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the “global warming” of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC’s models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity:

1. Radiative forcing ΔF;
2. The no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter κ; and
3. The feedback multiplier ƒ.

Some reasons why the IPCC’s estimates may be excessive and unsafe are explained. More importantly, the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no “climate crisis”, and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

Physics & Society: July 2008, Volume 37, Number 3

Full Paper at http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

Physics and Society is the quarterly of the Forum on Physics and Society, a division of the American Physical Society. It presents letters, commentary, book reviews and reviewed articles on the relations of physics and the physics community to government and society. It also carries news of the Forum and provides a medium for Forum members to exchange ideas. Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.

The Greenhouse Effect is a Myth: A Note from Jim Peden

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As a dissenting physicist, I simply can no longer buy the notion that CO2 produces any significant warming of the atmosphere at any rate.

I’ve studied the atomic absorption physics to death, from John Nicol’s extensive development to the much longer winded dissertation by Gerlich & Tscheuschner and everything in between, it simply doesn’t add up.

Even if every single IR photon absorbed by a CO2 molecule were magically transformed into purely thermal translational modes , the pitifully small quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t add up to much additional heat. And if the aforementioned magical 100% transformation from radiation into “heat” were true, then all arguments concerning re-emission ( source of all the wonderful “greenhouse effect” cartoons with their arrows flying in all directions ) are out the window.

More and more, I am becoming convinced that atmospheric heating is primarily by thermal conduction from the surface, whose temperature is determined primarily by solar absorption. I get a lot of email from laymen seeking simple answers ( I’m sure you all do as well ). My simple reply goes like this:

1. The sun heats the earth.
2. The earth heats the atmosphere
3. After the sun sets, the atmosphere cools back down

With a parting comment: If we were to have 96 continuous hours without sunlight, temperatures would likely be below freezing over all the world’s land masses. The warmest place you could find would be to take a swim in the nearest ocean. There is no physical process in the atmosphere which “traps” heat. The so-called “greenhouse effect ” is a myth.

Jim Peden

Jim is Webmaster of Middlebury Networks and Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, spent some of his earlier years as an Atmospheric Physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, studying ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere. As a student, he was elected to both the National Physics Honor Society and the National Mathematics Honor Fraternity, and was President of the Student Section of the American Institute of Physics. He was a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His thesis on charge transfer reactions in the upper atmosphere was co-published in part in the prestigious Journal of Chemical Physics. The results obtained by himself and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh remain today as the gold standard in the AstroChemistry Database. He was a co-developer of the Modulated Beam Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, declared one of the “100 Most Significant Technical Developments of the Year” and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.