Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Climate & Climate Change

What Percentage of Air is Human Sourced C02?

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In Australia, the public is not in favour of a proposed carbon tax, but the mainstream media, particularly the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, keep pushing the proposal along with the idea we face inevitable catastrophic climate change unless we change our ways.    The host of one commercial radio station, Alan Jones, has been putting the alternative perspective and is now being reprimanded…  interestingly on the science.   

Activist group, GetUp, claim Alan Jones is wrong to have broadcast that only 0.001 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the air if from human sources and claims the correct figure is 28 percent.  I thought the official figure was something like 3 per cent. 

[Read more…] about What Percentage of Air is Human Sourced C02?

No Carbon Tax: A Note from ComeonAustralia.com

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“In Australia…  The campaign against the Carbon Tax and the Prime Minister’s broken promise is gaining momentum.  Our petition is collecting thousands of signatures and comments. But we need many, many more, so please tell as many people as you can to sign.  

Two recent polls show that a clear majority of Australians oppose this tax, but the Government is ignoring you.

That means we need to redouble our efforts to show that the government is operating on a broken promise and in clear defiance of the Australian people.

The Prime Minister should take this tax to an election to seek a mandate (or otherwise let the Australian people defeat it at the ballot box).

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What to Listen to, Read, and Action This Week

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Consider this an open thread.  Let other readers of this blog know what you are watching, listening to, and reading, this week by way of a comment.

I was pleased to receive the March 2011 newsletter, Climate4You, with meteorological information from Ole Humlum* just yesterday.   It seems global warming continues to stall. 😉

The document is available at
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_February_2011.pdf

All temperatures are shown in degrees Celsius.

Previous issues of the newsletter, diagrams and supplementary material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/

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* Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography  Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences  University of Oslo, Box 1042 Blindern

Garnaut’s Second Update, Sceptics are the White Swans: A Note from David Stockwell and Cohenite

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THE Australian government relies on various science experts to argue its case in favour of anthropogenic global warming [AGW]; people like Will Steffen, David Karoly and the ubiquitous Tim Flannery supply the scientific credentials for the government’s belief in AGW.

The economic gravitas to the government’s proposed economics measures to solve AGW are provided by their go-to man, Professor Ross Garnaut. Garnaut does come with some impressive economic academic credentials from ANU and the University of Melbourne. Garnaut also has considerable experience in private industry and is chairman of Lihir Gold, the New Guinea based gold-mining company.

In 2008 former PM Rudd engaged Garnaut to prepare an Interim Report to support the then Rudd government’s intention to introduce an ETS to solve AGW. With Rudd no longer PM, the current government under PM Gillard has commissioned Garnaut to provide updates to his 2008 Interim Report to justify the Gillard government’s intention to introduce a carbon tax to solve AGW; make of that what you will.

This article looks at Garnaut’s second update [there is a link to a critique of Garnaut’s first update below]. Garnaut’s second update looks at the science supporting AGW. This science shows warming over the recent period. That much can be agreed with, but just about everything else Garnaut’s science says, how much warming and particularly what has caused that warming, is problematic and subject to strong contrary scientific evidence. So, when Garnaut boasts in the press “I was right about climate change” that is a hollow boast.

[Read more…] about Garnaut’s Second Update, Sceptics are the White Swans: A Note from David Stockwell and Cohenite

It Never Rains

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“POETRY, said Auden, makes nothing happen. Usually it doesn’t, but sometimes a poem gets quoted in a national argument because everybody knows it, or at least part of it, and for the occasion a few lines of familiar poetry suddenly seem the best way of summing up a viewpoint…

“Before the floods, proponents of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) view had argued that there would never be enough rain again, because of Climate Change. When it became clear that there might be more than enough rain, the view was adapted: the floods, too, were the result of Climate Change. In other words, they were something unprecedented. Those opposing this view — those who believed that in Australia nothing could be less unprecedented than a flood unless it was a drought — took to quoting Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’… 

Read more from Clive James here http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3743/full

[Via Neville]