This Arctic Buzzard, also known as a Rough-legged Buzzard (Buteo lagopus), was found with a broken wing but rehabilited successfully.
It’s a bird of prey with a diet consisting mostly of mice, lemmings and young rabbits. The breeding range is very northern, described as holarctic, and migrates southwards in the autumn.
Cheers,
Ann Novek
In Sweden
I took this slightly out-of-focus photograph from the verandah of my living room, four days ago and in doing so, formally began to re-establish my collection – hopefully, all is not lost.
By way of perspective, I have long suspected that one of the many benefits of living in tropical wilderness is the luxury of going barefoot. I maintain that removing the immediate protection of footwear and restoring direct contact with terra firma, with all its irregularities and unexpected anomalies, optimises one’s long-term proprioceptive interests. But more than mere exercise, an almost infinite combination of sensory variations underfoot, reverberates throughout one’s greater physiology to enunciate, in the most eloquent tones, relations with the natural environment.
The same can be said for the smörgåsbord of pheromones that infiltrate the sensory openings of Jacobson’s organ and target the limbic centres of the brain. By way of contrast and beneath an urban pair of veritable olfactory-ugg-boots, nature’s stimuli are swamped by a tidal wave of highly concentrated pollutants and chemical deodorants.
In this sense, unfettered exposure to the natural environment provides a myriad of sensations, spanning a gamut of pleasures and repugnancies. Indeed, how is one supposed to appreciate the inherent truth of a pleasurable sensation without regarding the agony and inconvenience of its equally unambiguous counterpart?
On this basis, I take some philosophical counsel from the suffering and inconvenience of my recent computer crash. Beyond the catastrophic loss of my entire data-base, save that which might be recoverable from expensive data restoration technology, my appreciation for computer technology is now balanced against my contempt for its sensational unreliability.
Incidentally, the upkeep of this blog can be assisted by using the donate button on the right-hand side of the homepage. Many thanks to those who have already done so.
Releasing his Interim Report in Adelaide [Australia] today, Professor Ross Garnaut who was appointed by the new Labor government to provide policy advice on climate change, said that Australia should
promote strong global action on climate change and be prepared to match the commitments of
other developed nations.
The Executive Summary states:
This Interim Report seeks to provide a flavour of early findings from the work of the Review,
to share ideas on work in progress as a basis for interaction with the Australian community,
and to indicate the scope of the work programme through to the completion of the Review.
There are some important areas of the Review’s work that are barely touched upon in the
Interim Report, which will feature prominently in the final reports. Adaptation to climate
change, energy efficiency and the distribution of the costs of climate change across
households and regions are amongst the prominent omissions from this presentation.
Many views put forward in this Interim Report represent genuinely interim judgements. The
Review looks forward to feedback from interested people before formulating
recommendations for the final reports.
Developments in mainstream scientific opinion on the relationship between emissions
accumulations and climate outcomes, and the Review’s own work on future “business as
usual” global emissions, suggest that the world is moving towards high risks of dangerous
climate change more rapidly than has generally been understood. This makes mitigation
more urgent and more costly. At the same time, it makes the probable effects of unmitigated
climate change more costly, for Australia and for the world.
The largest source of increased urgency is the unexpectedly high growth of the world
economy in the early twenty-first century, combined with unexpectedly high energy intensity
of that growth and continuing reliance on high-emissions fossil fuels as sources of energy.
These developments are associated with strong economic growth in the developing world,
first of all in China. The stronger growth has strong momentum and is likely to continue. It is
neither desirable nor remotely feasible to seek to remove environmental pressures through
diminution of the aspirations of the world’s people for higher material standards of living. The
challenge is to end the linkage between economic growth and emissions of greenhouse
gases.
Australia’s interest lies in the world adopting a strong and effective position on climate
change mitigation. This interest is driven by two realities of Australia’s position relative to
other developed countries: our exceptional sensitivity to climate change: and our exceptional
opportunity to do well in a world of effective global mitigation. Australia playing its full part in
international efforts on climate change can have a positive effect on global outcomes. The
direct effects of Australia’s emissions reduction efforts are of secondary importance.
Australia has an important role to play alongside its international partners in establishing a
realistic approach to global mitigation. Australia can contribute to the development of clear
international understandings on the four components of a successful framework for global
mitigation: setting the right global objectives for reduction of the risk of dangerous climate
change; converting this into a goal for stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at
a specified level; calculating the amount of additional emissions that can be emitted into the
atmosphere over a specified number of years if stabilisation of atmospheric concentrations is
to be achieved at the desired level; and developing principles for allocating a limited global
emissions budget among countries.
Australia should make firm commitments in 2008, to 2020 and 2050 emissions targets that
embody similar adjustment cost to that accepted by other developed countries. A lead has
been provided by the European Union, and there are reasonable prospects that the United
States will become part of the main international framework after the November 2008
elections. Some version of the current State and Federal targets of 60 per cent reduction by
2050, with appropriate interim targets, would meet these requirements.
Download and read the full report here: http://www.garnautreview.org.au/CA25734E0016A131/pages/reports-and-papers
It took just a couple hours and data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.
Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy – a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across – is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.
Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.
“We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn’t find any mistakes.”
The University of Sydney team’s analysis differs from previous calculations because they were more discerning with their data selection. “We used data from pulsars: stars that flash with a regular pulse,” Professor Gaensler explains. “As light from these pulsars travels to us, it interacts with electrons scattered between the stars (the Warm Ionised Medium, or WIM), which slows the light down.
“In particular, the longer (redder) wavelengths of the pulse slow down more than the shorter (bluer) wavelengths, so by seeing how far the red lags behind the blue we can calculate how much WIM the pulse has travelled through.
“If you know the distance to the pulsar accurately, then you can work out how dense the WIM is and where it stops – in other words where the Galaxy’s edge is.
“Of the thousands of pulsars known in and around our Galaxy, only about 60 have really well known distances. But to measure the thickness of the Milky Way we need to focus only on those that are sitting above or below the main part of the Galaxy; it turns out that pulsars embedded in the main disk of the Milky Way don’t give us useful information.”
Choosing only the pulsars well above or below us cuts the number of measurements by a factor of three, but it is precisely this rejection of data points that makes The University of Sydney’s analysis different from previous work.
“Some colleagues have come up to me and have said ‘That wrecks everything!’” says Professor Gaensler. “And others have said ‘Ah! Now everything fits together!’”
The team’s results were presented in January this year at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.
About Professor Bryan Gaensler:
Professor Gaensler is a graduate of the University of Sydney and former Young Australian of the Year. After working at the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University he was lured back to Australia on prestigious Federation Fellowship. One of the world’s leading astronomers, his research interests include studying the essential role that magnetic fields play in the generation of turbulence and large-scale structures, the production of high-energy cosmic ray particles, and the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
University of Sydney Media Release 20th February 2008
Philosopher Karl Popper claimed in his book ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ that a hypothesis, proposition or theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable:
“Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper’s account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science.”
It seems that whatever happens in the climate system is consistent with climate model predictions. Warmer, colder, less ice, more ice, droughts, floods, more hurricanes, less hurricanes, stronger hurricanes, weaker hurricanes, and so on.
An recent example from the media:
Cold wave in India attributed to global warming
Mumbai: The recent cold wave sweeping across Mumbai and other parts of India could be attributed to global warming, experts said on Tuesday here at an environmental conference.
Would the observed mid-troposphere warming of less than the 2 to 3 times increase over surface warming predicted by climate models represent falsification? Or would a prolonged period of global cooling do the job?
So, what event or observation, or series of events/observations over what timescale are required to falsify the climate modelled hypothesis of CO2 driven climate change or global warming?
This post was inspired by a couple of blog posts over at Prometheus:
The Consistent-With Game: On Climate Models and the Scientific Method
Climate Model Predictions and Adaptation
Serious answers to a serious question, please.
A 15-year research project has revealed that changes in wind patterns are contributing to rising sea temperatures in the Southern Ocean.
ABC News: ‘Research shows Southern Ocean wind currents weakening’
CSIRO Media release: ‘Antarctic route highlights new ocean-climate links’
Thanks to Luke for alerting me to this story.
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.
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