Europe has clashed with the US Obama administration over climate change in a potentially damaging split that comes ahead of crucial political negotiations on a new global deal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. US negotiators have told European counterparts that the Obama administration intends to sweep away almost all of the Kyoto architecture and replace it with a system of its own design. Read more here (The Guardian) and here (German Press). via Benny Peiser.
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Warming Hawaii (Part 2): A Note from Tim Curtin
A TECHNICAL paper, Secular temperature changes in Hawai‘i, published just last year in Geophysical Research Letters indicates there has been recent warming on the island of Hawaii and this has been most evident at high elevations. Retired economist, Tim Curtin, has reviewed the paper and comes to a different conclusion.
Mr Curtin has also plotted his own chart, see above, drawing on the atmospheric CO2 data recorded at the Mauna Loa Slope Observatory since mid-1958 and the temperatures reported at the same location. Interestingly despite the increasing interest in changes in climate, Mr Curtin comments that since 1992 data collection has been erratic at this key site.
Tim Curtin explains his objections and conclusions: [Read more…] about Warming Hawaii (Part 2): A Note from Tim Curtin
No Place for Morality in School Science
IN some Australian schools science teachers are being asked to tell about the dangers of global warming and show Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in order to prepare the students for the big vote at http://youthdecide.com.au/ .
The vote is sponsored by World Vision; Australia’s largest charitable organisation with a history of working with schools.
When I was about 13, in about 1976, my school promoted World Vision’s 40 Hour Famine to raise money to feed children in poor countries. I only raised a small amount through the sponsorship program but it made me feel like I had participated in something good – something worthwhile.
Now World Vision is involved in not only humanitarian work but also the politics of climate change: ‘Youth Decide ’09’ is a national youth vote on climate change sponsored by World Vision and no doubt results from the poll will be used leading up to the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to tell the Rudd Government how Australian Students want cuts in emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020. [Read more…] about No Place for Morality in School Science
Official Comment on Temperature Trends
Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade. The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset is +0.07±0.07°C decade–1—much less than the 0.18°C decade–1 recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the 0.2°C decade–1 expected in the next decade. Read more here from UK Met. Bureau.
Risking the Reputation of Science: Garth Paltridge
“Perhaps the most interesting question in all this business is how it can be that the scientific community has become so over-the-top in support of its own propaganda about the seriousness and certainty of upcoming drastic climate change. Scientists after all are supposed to be unbiased in their assessment of a problem and are expected to tell it as it is. Over the centuries they have built up the capital of their reputation on just that supposition. And for the last couple of decades they have put that capital very publicly on the line in support of a cause which, to say the least, is overhung by an enormous amount of doubt. So how is it that the rest of the scientific community, uncomfortable as it is with both the science of global warming and the way its politics is being played, continues to let the reputation of science in general be put at considerable risk because of the way the dangers of climate change are being vastly oversold?” Garth Paltridge*
Some answers are here: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26056202-7583,00.html
* ‘Global warming hotheads freeze out science’s sceptics’ by Christopher Pearson, in The Australian, on September 12, 2009
Abiotic Oil (Part 3)
“RESEARCHERS at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have been able to prove that the fossils of animals and plants are not necessary to generate raw oil and natural gas. This result is extremely radical as it means that it will be much easier to find these energy sources and that they may be located all over the world.”
That’s according to their own media release which continues: [Read more…] about Abiotic Oil (Part 3)
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.