[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ob9WdbXx0&w=425&h=350]
Global warming: David Attenborough speaks
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Tag Archives: Global Warming
Universe-wide climate change?
As others in the blog world have picked up: four of Australia’s coalition MP’s raised doubts about the consensus that humans are causing climates change. Whilst this in itself is nothing new, the interesting aspect is their justification:
The four backbenchers have questioned the link between human activity and global warming, saying Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and Neptune are also warming up.
Nuclear physicist and West Australian MP Denis Jensen, former ministers and NSW backbenchers Jackie Kelly and Danna Vale, and Northern Territory MP Dave Tollner say the hypothesis of “anthropogenic" or human created global warming was based on theoretical models and unproven economic assumptions. (The Australian)
I have to say, using Astronomy to cloud the issue is a new one to me.
"Climate change is a natural phenomenon that has always been with us and always will be," they said in a document challenging the findings of a cross-party parliamentary report looking at carbon capture options for Australia.
"It is the natural property of planets with fluid envelopes to have variability in climate. Thus, at any given time, we may expect about half the planets to be warming. This has nothing to do with human activities," the four said. (Reuters Article)
Novel, fascinating but unsupported by science. And what these four backbenchers don’t explain to us is why our world hasn’t been warming at the current rate for millions of years (and why it is now) or why all the hundreds of other pieces of evidence presented in the 4th assessment report from the IPCC are wrong. Granted, that may take some time.
I wonder what it must be like to have political representation from someone with this level of insight? I must say, you’d have to be a bit worried!
A Bolt out of the blue.
As I was quoted in The Australian this weekend in a piece entitled “Coral bleaching as record cold snap hits” (and have blogged here earlier on several occasions), cold weather across southern Queensland has resulted in coral bleaching in the exposed reef flats in the Capricorn Bunker group and the Keppell Islands (as confirmed by a CSIRO oceanographer, David Griffin).
No sooner than this was published, Andrew Bolt, an Op-Ed writer for the Herald Sun took dislike to the published comment: “Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said the extreme variation in temperature might be more common as climate change caused hotter summers and colder winters”.
Welcome back from vacation, Andrew. I must say, I have missed you.
Blackle
vs 
The more energy conscious of you might want to take a look at a new google derived search engine, Blackle. As quoted from the website:
“Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. The Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen” Continue reading
Climate shifts news round-up
- Reporting in Nature, researchers from Canada show that: “… anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation within latitudinal bands, and that these changes cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing.” Whilst no-one wants to be quoted on record that the current flooding across Europe and England is related to climate change (although see some media sources), a Reuters article states an inconvenient truth: “floods force many to face climate change reality“.
- Whilst the Prime Minister Gordon Brown is forced to acknowledge that floods in England are related to climate change, his US counterpart President G.W. Bush is rapped for being “ignorant on climate change” by the UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon. Continue reading
Winter bleaching again on the southern Great Barrier Reef.
Unusually cold weather on the southern Great Barrier Reef has triggered localized bleaching on the reef crest at Heron Island. Low tide, strong winds and unusually cold wintry weather in July 2007 has caused the top few centimeters of coral in the intertidal sections of the reef to bleach. Cold bleaching has been reported before at Heron Island by others during 2003, and is very similar to bleaching that occurs when water gets too warm.
So, is this event a sign of global climate change?
I don’t think we have enough evidence to say this right now. Some models, however, suggest that the southern Great Barrier Reef may experience colder winters with a weakening if the south Pacific gyre, which runs down the east coast of Australia and normally pushes warm water southward. Certainly, colder years tend to follow strong El Nino (warm) years. So far we have seen winter bleaching on the southern Great Barrier Reef in 1999, 2003 and now in 2007. In the three cases, the preceding years 1998, 2002 and 2006 were very warm years and saw extensive coral bleaching on the southern Great Barrier Reef.
Perhaps a passing meteorologist could work this one out for us. If there is a connection to climate change, then we might need to consider the effect of corals stressed out in summer that are then stressed again in the following winter.
Swindled – an evening lost
After putting the kids to bed, I got my mug of cocoa and sat down to watch The Great Climate Change Swindle. Let’s call it ‘Swindle’ because that is how I felt once it had rolled out across Australia.What I was rather disappointed by was the attempt to sell me, the average citizen, a series of thinly disguised half-truths about the lack of a linkage between carbon dioxide and global temperature, and then how the activity of that vicious orb in the sky was driving the climate.
The dulcet tones of Durkin waxed and waned, through the ‘facts’ and how dodgy scientists must be – I must have dozed off, but I seemed to come to as I was told that Margaret Thatcher had started the equivalent of Marxist, greenie plot called Climate Change so she could get into nuclear energy. Wow, I never knew!
Further commentary on the “Swindle”
From a colleague and good friend of mine, Dr. Paul Marshall, (Acting Director – Climate Change, Great Barrier Marine Park Authority):
“It is extremely frustrating to see the inordinate influence these so-called climate skeptics have on the broader community’s perception of climate change. Uncertainty and doubt about the reality and causes of climate change can no longer be justified in the face of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s findings represent the consensus of thousands of the world’s leading experts, developed through a highly scrutinised and transparent process, and adopted by the majority of the world’s governments, including Australia and the USA. None of us want climate change to be real, and we certainly don’t want to think that we might be the cause of it. But denial and self-delusion are luxuries that we cannot afford. Ecosystems are already beginning to decline and people are starting to suffer due to extremes in environmental conditions that will only get worse with climate change. Anyone who has seen the effects that abnormally high water temperatures have on coral reefs can not sit back and hope that climate change isn’t happening, or that it will simply fix itself. Mass coral bleaching has already caused lasting damage to sections of the Great Barrier Reef. While we have been lucky compared to many other reef areas (some of which lost 50-90% of their corals in 1998 alone) the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is taking the threat of climate change very seriously. If we have any hope of helping coral reefs survive climate change, it will require a concerted and dedicated effort to reduce the effects that our activities are having on the world’s climate.” Continue reading
ABC & Lateline
Thursday 12th July, 8.30pm – ABC television are showing the controversial documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle“, written and directed by Martin Durkin followed by a Lateline analysis (10.30pm) interviewing Durkin and a range of scientists who oppose and support Durkin’s proposition. This will be essential viewing – originally shown in Britain by Channel 4 as ” Everything you’ve ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue” (more).
Analysis of the “scientific facts” and social commentary to follow shortly from www.climateshifts.org and John Quiggin’s blog (www.johnquiggin.com) – watch this space. Meanwhile, take a look at two contrasting pieces published in The Australian newspaper yesterday (10th July)”:
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| “Sun not behind global warming” – Leigh Dayton (10/07/07) |
“It’s good sense to avoid consensus on global warming” – Bob Carter (10/07/07) |
Updated: See Professor Ian Lowe’s detailed response in today’s Herald Sun (11/07/07):
“The Channel 4 film is indeed a great global warming swindle. It purports to show scientific evidence casting doubt on the conclusion that most of the recent climate change is due to human burning of fossil fuels. In fact, most of the “science” is either wrong or selective, so the film does not pose any real question about even the cautious conservative conclusions of the IPCC. If it is shown without an appropriate public health warning, it could give the misleading impression that the science is still uncertain and delay even further the urgently-needed concerted response..”
Climate change “hysteria” ?
Interesting to read the latest anti climate change op-ed piece by Professor Bob Carter in the Courier Mail the other day.
Instead of contesting the tone of his argument, I will stick to what Professor Carter describes as the ‘salient facts’ with which he uses to show that climate change is nothing but “hysteria”:
The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 percent) in atmospheric CO2.
Whilst this finding of the IPCC is an interesting point (see Graph a below), this fact alone does not disprove climate change: what is more misleading is what Professor Carter isn’t telling you.
