Jennifer Marohasy

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Adelaide Professor: Scientists Must Confront Climate Sceptics

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AN Adelaide professor says scientists must do more to stand up to “anti-intellectual” climate change deniers, by explaining the difference between good science and spin.

University of Adelaide Professor Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability, said in climate science and policy there were still a few apparently well-educated people who continued to deny the vast body of scientific knowledge and analysis.

The original Australasian Science article is here:

Make a Stand for Good Science

The Adelaide Now article is here.

Professor Brook feels the need to quote alarmist blogger Joe Romm who has recently made science policy expert Roger Pielke Jr the focus of repeated attacks, calling him a ‘delayer.’

Of ‘deniers’ he said, “They are hard to pin down because they don’t want a serious scientific debate.”

That’s odd – I thought the debate was over. He also stoops to the tired old tobacco and oil smears.

I think I’d sum up Professor Brook’s article as lacking substance and a severe case of ‘pot calling the kettle black.’

Wildlife Accidents Part 2 – A Note From Ann Novek

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1) In Sweden there’s an old pagan custom with big bonfires on April 30, called the Walpurgis Night.

Unfortunately, many hedgehogs have been hiding out in the stacks /piles of old trees and branches that will be lit during the night and many fatal accidents happen with hedgehogs.

Here’s a picture of a hedgehog that was badly burnt, but saved by a person from the fire. Wounds healed well, but new spikes didn’t grow up. The animal was released into a protected enclosure as it now didn’t have a complete defence from badgers and dogs.

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2) Picture number 2, the balloon hedgehog. No reasons have been found for this condition but possibly damage to the respiratory system has allowed inspired air to escape and fill the subcutaneous cavity. Relief is provided by using a needle and syringe to release air and using antibiotics.

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This is a quite common disease among hedgehogs. The animal in the picture was rehabilitated successfully and released.

EU Renewables Plan to Cost £160 per Household

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EU plans call for the UK to increase its use of renewables in the energy mix from the current 5% to 15% by 2020. An independent British government commissioned report for BERR, the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, shows that these plans will cost between EURO 5 and 6 billion annually. On a per household basis, this could increase the average energy bill for every household in Britain by £160 a year — and that’s on top of increases driven by mainstream energy prices, says East Midlands MEP Roger Helmer.

Protesting against the proposals, Helmer argues that in any case many of the renewables initiatives are set to do more harm than good. There is increasing evidence that biofuels save little CO2, but they are driving up world food prices, and putting huge new pressure on rainforests and natural habitats, threatening species with extinction. Wind farms provide limited benefit, especially when placed in peaty heath-land environments. Many of Britain’s new wind-farm development proposals, especially in Scotland, are on soils of this type, where the disturbance of ancient peat deposits for foundations, roads and other infrastructure can release more CO2 than the turbines would save in their lifetimes.

Commenting on the developments, Helmer said “There is no point in agonising over fuel poverty, then agreeing plans which will hugely add to energy costs — especially when those plans will fail to deliver the CO2 reductions envisaged. This is a typical example of EU integration allowing bureaucrats to make mistakes on an heroic scale”.

PRESS RELEASE ENDS

Notes to editors

POYRY REPORT: Poyry is a well-reputed energy research and consultancy company, commissioned by the British government (BERR) to do the cost analysis, which despite their insistence on confidentiality has somehow emerged on the BERR website at http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45238.pdf

ROGER HELMER MEP
www.rogerhelmer.com

“While the US Constitution is chiefly about the rights of the individual, the EU Constitution is chiefly about the power of the state.”

Australia’s Emissions Trading System to Cost Business $22 Billion

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THE Rudd Government’s planned carbon trading system will cost business between $14billion and $22billion a year and will have to be considered in a review of the taxation system.

Taxation Institute director Michael Dirkis yesterday said that the money generated by the emissions trading system would be equivalent to more than 40 per cent of company tax revenue.

“You cannot design a system that impacts on business and brings in that level of government revenue without dealing with tax,” he said.

The Australian: Carbon plan ‘to cost business $22bn’

Of course, the effect on climate will be a big fat zero.

First Australian NASA Astronaut: An Ice Age Cometh

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Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.

Excerpt: The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon. The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790. Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots. That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern. It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850. There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it. Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases. […] All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead. It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.

The Australian: Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

Antarctic Deep Sea Gets Colder

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The Antarctic deep sea gets colder, which might stimulate the circulation of the oceanic water masses. This is the first result of the Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in Punta Arenas/Chile. At the same time satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent on record. In the coming years autonomous measuring buoys will be used to find out whether the cold Antarctic summer induces a new trend or was only a “slip”.

The Polarstern expedition ANT-XXIV/3 was dedicated to examining the oceanic circulation and the oceanic cycles of materials that depend on it. Core themes were the projects CASO (Climate of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean) and GEOTRACES, two of the main projects in the Antarctic in the International Polar Year 2007/08.

Under the direction of Dr Eberhard Fahrbach, Oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute, 58 scientists from ten countries were on board the research vessel Polarstern in the Southern Ocean from 6 February until 16 April, 2008. They studied ocean currents as well as the distribution of temperature, salt content and trace substances in Antarctic sea water. “We want to investigate the role of the Southern Ocean for past, present and future climate,” chief scientist Fahrbach said. The sinking water masses in the Southern Ocean are part of the overturning in this region and thus play a major role in global climate. “While the last Arctic summer was the warmest on record, we had a cold summer with a sea-ice maximum in the Antarctic. The expedition shall form the basis for understanding the opposing developments in the Arctic and in the Antarctic,” Fahrbach said.

In the frame of the GEOTRACES project the scientists found the smallest iron concentrations ever measured in the ocean. As iron is an essential trace element for algal growth, and algae assimilate CO2 from the air, the concentration of iron is an important parameter against the background of the discussion to what extent the oceans may act as a carbon sink.

As the oceanic changes only become visible after several years and also differ spatially, the data achieved during the Polarstern expeditions are not sufficient to discern long-term developments. The data gap can only be closed with the aid of autonomous observing systems, moored at the seafloor or drifting freely, that provide oceanic data for several years. “As a contribution to the Southern Ocean Observation System we deployed, in international cooperation, 18 moored observing stations, and we recovered 20. With a total of 65 floating systems that can also collect data under the sea ice and are active for up to five years we constructed a unique and extensive measuring network,” Fahrbach said.

In order to get the public, and especially the young generation, interested in science and research and to sensitise them for environmental processes, two teachers were on board Polarstern. Both took an active part in research work and communicated their experiences to pupils, colleagues and the media via internet and telephone. “We will bring home many impressions from this expedition, and we will be able to provide a lively picture of the polar regions and their impact on the whole earth to the pupils,” Charlotte Lohse, teacher at the Heisenberg-Gymnasium in Hamburg, and Stefan Theisen from the Free Waldorf School in Kiel said.

AWI Press Release: The Antarctic deep sea gets colder