Tianjara Falls, Moreton National Park
Climate Change – New Data, Same Arguments
In today’s SMH and The Australian are several articles written around the release of the “Annual Australian Climate Statement 2009” by the Bureau of Meteorology, http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20100105.shtml
Issued 5th January 2010, 2009 will be remembered for extreme bushfires, dust-storms, lingering rainfall deficiencies, areas of flooding and record-breaking heatwaves. Second warmest year for Australia
This has been interpreted by our Federal Government as clear evidence that CO2 is causing the temperature rise. The Opposition is advocating change-action to halt the CO2 instead of a tax on emissions.
Rosie Lewis And Ben Cubby, “Heatwave shows need for carbon deal: Garrett”, SMH, 6 January 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/environment/heatwave-shows-need-for-carbon-deal-garrett-20100105-lses.html
THE Federal Government has said climate data showing last year was Australia’s second-hottest on record means the Senate should pass the emissions trading scheme next month. The Opposition said it was cynical to link the data to the emissions trading legislation, and said if emissions needed to be cut then ”direct action”, such as changing soil composition to absorb more carbon, would suffice.
But the Government claimed science was on its side. “It’s up to the Senate and Mr Abbott to recognise that climate change is real, to recognise that for Australians warming is happening,” the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, said yesterday. The report was consistent with the “unequivocal science view” that global warming was happening as a consequence of human activities, “and it’s in our economic and environmental interest to arrest it”, he said. “The Australian public expect decent climate change policy from the Leader of the Opposition. At the moment all they’re getting is mistakes and thought bubbles.”
And then there was this (quoted selectively):
Christopher Monckton, “Mr Rudd, your misguided warming policies are killing millions”, The Australian, 6 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/mr-rudd-your-misguided-warming-policies-are-killing-millions/story-e6frg6zo-1225816411782
You say “formal global and national economic modelling” shows “that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting”. Yet, every economic analysis except that of the now discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money to stop the tide from coming in.
You led a delegation of 114 people to Copenhagen to bring back a non-result. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts, why should the taxpayers tighten theirs?
Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. … At a time when so many of the world’s people are already short of food, the UN’s right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has rightly condemned the biofuel scam as “a crime against humanity”.
Yet this slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90 per cent certain that most of the “global warming” since 1950 is man-made. This claim – based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure – is demonstrably false…. Nor is the IPCC’s great lie the only lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a “global warming” profiteer.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley for background. The florid writing added to the ‘millions starving because of bio-fuels’, plus this background, has me placing him out on the ‘wacky’ fringe.
And then there was this (again selectively quoted):
Natasha Robinson, “Sceptics use temperatures to cast doubt on carbon theory”, The Australian, 6 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sceptics-use-temperatures-to-cast-doubt-on-carbon-theory/story-e6frg6nf-1225816385293
THE weather bureau’s latest climate statement has nothing to suggest that warmer temperatures are the result of increased carbon dioxide emissions, climate change sceptics say. And despite the new figures indicating that the past decade was the warmest since record-keeping began, the sceptics point to the fact that there has been relatively little upward shift in temperatures since the 1980s.
Meteorologist William Kininmonth, a former head of the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, said yesterday the globe was still coming out of the Little Ice Age. “The globe has been warming for the past 300 years and so it is not surprising that the recent decade is probably warmer than anything else we have experienced in the last century,” he said.
Engineer and climate modeller David Evans yesterday blamed an “urban heat island” effect on thermometers, as well as the location of many thermometers at airports, for the higher temperature data. He also claimed that the weather bureau’s unadjusted raw data showed a cooling trend of temperatures. “It’s pretty clear that global warming is not predominantly due to carbon dioxide,” Dr Evans said. But National Climate Centre climatologist Blair Trewin said yesterday that the latest data indicated that long-term warming was probably the result of increased carbon emissions.
“It’s pretty solid evidence that warming trends that we have seen over the last century globally are consistent with what we would expect given the change that has happened in the atmosphere,” Dr Trewin said. A lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, University of Melbourne meteorology professor David Karoly, said yesterday there was no doubt the increased temperatures recorded were the result of human factors. “It is clear that there will be ongoing warming globally and in Australia, and that that warming will accelerate due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he said.
With the release of new data the two camps have reacted flamboyantly which leaves me wondering what politics Rudd and Abbot will play when parliament resumes? It would be useful to now see some climate-change opinion polls for a glimpse of what a sample of Australians think about this issue..
Today’s Podcasts
For someone influenced by Bach’s music, this adds much to my appreciation.“Bach, the Evangelist”, Encounter, 27 December 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2009/2783278.htm
Silver medallist at the New York Festivals, this Encounter finds Johann Sebastian in his upstairs apartment at St Thomas’ School, a ‘cantata factory.’ Seemingly oblivious to beasts in the town square, students in the corridors, and at least eight offspring at home, he produced the world’s greatest music.
And having spent much time in the arid north this inspired me to go back to some of those isolated jewels of red earth.
“The Composition of Souls”, Encounter, 3 January 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2010/2750959.htm
Ludwig Leichhardt
In 1993 a group of men and women in the tiny township of Yowah in far Western Queensland told Encounter of their response to a vast and jewelled country of opals, red earth and heat. How did their response to land compare with the journals of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who had travelled nearby and who is also represented in Patrick White’s Voss? This Encounter won a Silver Medal in the New York Radio Festivals for its reflections on European responses to remote Australia.