Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Weblog Cost-Recovery

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Xanthomera2.jpg

Do you see what I see? There is a new ‘Donate’ feature on the home-page of The Politics & Environment Blog. Its purpose is self-evident and it is hoped that members of our weblog community will consider availing themselves of the facility to help share the load, as it were.

Since the 14th April 2005, when the site was first launched, over 1,515 entries have been published eliciting some 41,440 comments. It has become quite the gathering place for our community of interest. Whilst we are often conflicted by ideology on issues raised, we also embrace strong environmental values, which for many would include sustainability and ‘user-pays’. It could be said that expenditure and environment often make for strange bedfellows, but the fact is, there is a growing cost to the maintenance and operation of the weblog.

In another popular gathering place, visitors to the Daintree rainforest consistently express strong expectations that the destination will reveal sightings of some of Australia’s most unique wildlife in natural habitat. Unfortunately, the majority are unsuccessful and not because the ecological values of the landscape fall short of the mark, but that the travel-style is so completely contradictory.

Three-quarters of the half-million (or so) travellers per year are bound to the travel-intensive itineraries of day-visitation out of Cairns or Port Douglas; only a quarter stay overnight. There is also a significant destination bias, with summer holidays from the northern hemisphere and escapees from the winter chill of southern states, supplying the largest numbers of overnight visitors to the winter rainforest at is most dormant.

Elusive encounters with rainforest beauties, like the (above) male Orange-thighed tree-frog (Litoroia xanthomera), are few and far between. Visitors would be well-advised to travel into the rainforest at the hottest, wettest time of the year and to engage the expertise of a local inhabitant, to maximise prospects for successful sightings. However, to do so they would need to stridently go against the flow and direct their travel dollars more purposefully.

Perhaps the same could be said of the weblog; a purposeful direction of economic support might bolster the vitality of the forum even more substantially than the rigour of free comment.

Another Climate Scare Goes into Reverse

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I can barely keep up with the current raft of peer reviewed papers that drive yet more nails into the coffin of climate alarmism. Following on from the fading huricane scare that I recently blogged about here, a new paper published in Nature on 17th January, further destroys the myth that ocean currents will slow due to global warming:

The scientific community has long believed that as global warming continues and large amounts of freshwater ice melt into the ocean, the ocean’s circulation will slow. This would have a catastrophic impact on the environment as vividly, if somewhat overdramatically, portrayed in the film “The Day After Tomorrow.” But a paper published last week in Nature magazine, the result of several studies of past and possible future weather, says that in fact the very opposite is true and ocean circulation will become stronger as the icecaps melt.
Eric Schwartz, Arizona Daily Star, 30 January 2008

The evidence is piling up, that those models predicting a weakened ocean circulation in the coming decades are wrong.
Joellen Russell, University of Arizona, Russell, 30 January 2008

Current climate-system models say that the ocean’s overturning circulation will weaken over the next century, but these predictions might not rest on a solid foundation… From the observations, it is clear that large circulation changes took place, and it seems unlikely that circulation changes of this magnitude could have happened without substantial changes in the wind forcing. It seems that the information from the past is telling us to expect a stronger oceanic circulation in the warmer climate to come.
J. R. Toggweiler & Joellen Russell, Nature 17 January 2008

The full paper is here:

Nature 451, 286-288 (17 January 2008)

Ocean circulation in a warming climate

J. R. Toggweiler 1) & Joellen Russell 2)

1) J. R. Toggweiler is at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Princeton, New Jersey 08542, USA.

2) Joellen Russell is in the Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.

Correspondence should be addressed to J.R.T. (Email: robbie.toggweiler@noaa.gov).

Climate models predict that the ocean’s circulation will weaken in response to global warming, but the warming at the end of the last ice age suggests a different outcome.

Enjoy!

Hat tip to Benny Peiser’s CCNet.

You Can’t Tax the Sun

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Yes, if you can’t tax the Sun, the current highly politicised state of climate science suggests that there isn’t much point spending money on understanding the Sun either.

I refer to this article on the BBC website: ‘Space weather science rues cuts’

Excerpt: The field of science dedicated to understanding “space weather” – which can pose hazards to satellites and aircraft – may be wiped out in the UK. That is the verdict of experts responding to UK physics and astronomy cuts made as administrators seek to plug an £80m hole in their finances.

Tracking the Sun’s changing activity is vital for managing radiation doses and for protecting aircraft electronics. It is also of economic importance, since it costs airlines to deviate from flight paths.

Blog contributor Arnost observes:

One of the risks that the world faces, as more and more funds are diverted to AGW and related projects, is that “real” science will get under-funded.

This is a case in point – understanding Solar Terrestrial Physics is critical. If adequate warning of solar activity is not provided, Solar Flares / Coronal Mass Emissions etc. may fry satellite electronics (if they aren’t shut down), and in worst cases may cause aircraft (esp. in trans-polar routes) to suffer major electronic failure putting lives at
risk.

It is of course ironic that the first cuts are made to the Solar Terrestrial Physics field – as this is the major threat to the CO2 driven AGW thesis in that a viable counter-theory may be found as a by-product of monitoring / predicting solar behaviour.

IPCC Chairman Tries to Explain Global Non-Warming

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The head of the UN IPCC is sounding like a salesman who is worried about the quality of his product:

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century. “One would really have to see on the basis of some analysis what this really represents,” he told Reuters, adding “are there natural factors compensating?” for increases in greenhouse gases from human activities.

So, Pachauri has noticed that the natural ‘El Nino’ driven record year for instrumentally measured ‘global average temperature’ remains as 1998. We are now in 2008, Rather than admit to the possibility that ever increasing CO2 emissions don’t seem to be pushing up global temperatures, he is looking for another excuse.

Read more on Pielke Jr’s excellent Prometheus blog.

Would Nathan Dam have Stopped Reef Flooding?

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There has been a lot of rain in central Queensland over the last month. Water has been flowing over the Fairbairn dam spillway and the Nogoa River has flooded the town of Emerald with over 2,000 residents seeking emergency accommodation. The Nogoa River flows into the MacKenzie River which flows into the Fitzroy River which flows into the Great Barrier Reef.

According to environmental researcher Alison Jones floodwaters flowing down the Fitzroy River to the Great Barrier Reef will kill off masses of coral around the Keppel Islands.

So, according to Jones, floodwaters are bad for the reef.

The Dawson River, also flows into the Fitzroy River, and was to have a massive dam built in its headwaters. But development of the Nathan Dam was blocked through a court action brought by the Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

If the Nathan dam had been built on the Dawson River would there now be less flooding of the Great Barrier Reef, or would there be not enough flooding? Is there such a things as just the right amount of flooding?

Instability in Sustainability: Paraphrasing Aynsley Kellow

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The American Geophysical Union (AGU) recently released a statement on climate change which began, ”The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming.”

Implicit in this sentence, and implicit in the concept of ‘sustainability’, is the idea that there is such a thing as a steady state …nature in balance. But as Aynsley Kellow wrote way back in 2002:

“There is no clear consensus on what sustainability means, but there are some fundamental questions inherent in all this. Sustainable for how long? Are ecosystems to be sustained? Or should the emphasis be on the sustainability of human societies? If so, should it be all humanity? Nation-states? Or subgroups, including traditional societies, threatened by development activities? (see Sneddon, 2000).

“Many of the conceptions which aim to settle this matter rest – as eventually did the ESD [Ecologically Sustainable Development] process in Australia – on a notion of ecological sustainability. But how helpful is this? Ecologists once thought that nature left free of human interference would eventually reach a steady state, but over the past 30 years ecological disturbance has replaced the climax community among most ecological scientists – a revolution to which Australian Ralph Slatyer made a significant contribution.

“It is a point of some interest that in the popular imagination, the stability of the climax community is probably still the dominant ‘myth of nature’, sustained by constant repetition by political ecologists and, like sustained yield in Germany, no doubt offering the promise of stability in uncertain and rapidly changing times.

“An ecological science in which perturbation, turbulence, disturbance, succession and flux are the norm creates insurmountable problems for ecocentric philosophical positions. While we are not reduced to seeing nature in purely utilitarian terms, it does place the emphasis back on human choice – in Botkin’s (1990) terms, we must choose among the discordant harmonies of nature those elements we wish to retain. We must reject nature as providing norms which guide how we must live and accept instead that we are part of a living, changing system; we can chose to accept, use, or control elements to make for a habitable existence, both singly and individually.

“An emphasis on disturbance and chaos also suggests we need to be cautious about assuming we can manage resources at sustained yield …

Read more here: http://www.science.org.au/sats2002/kellow.htm

from: SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME 2002: ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM. Transition to sustainability . 3 May 2002. Social aspects of sustainability. by Professor Aynsley Kellow