Jennifer Marohasy

A WEEK ago President Barrack Obama praised the House of Representatives for passing the ‘Clean Energy and Security Act’. Everyone agrees that it’s far reaching legislation.

The US Environment Protection Agency had one of its employees, a 35-year veteran of the agency, Alan Carlin, critique the supporting technical documentation for the legislation. Mr Carlin’s report advised that the scientific hypothesis on which the draft legislation is based is seriously flawed. Instead of considering the report in some detail, Mr Carlin was censored. The claim of censorship runs contrary to the new President’s promises of more transparency as explained by Kimberley A. Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

“ONE of President Barack Obama’s first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science.

“The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, ‘As administrator, I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.’ In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that ‘the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over.’

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YOU will have heard on the news over the last three weeks of the activities of Senator Steve Fielding in Australia. Steve is an independent cross-bench senator who holds a casting vote over the passage of the Australian ETS (termed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme).

After attending the Heartland-3 climate conference in Washington in early June this year, Steve returned to Australia and asked Climate Minister Penny Wong three simple questions about climate change. The Minister replied, first in a meeting at which her Chief Scientist (Penny Sackett) and departmental science adviser (Will Steffen) presented a briefing paper, and secondly in writing. Senator Fielding then asked his advisory scientists – Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kinimonth – to perform an audit of the Minister’s replies to his questions.

Copies of Senator Fielding’s original questions, Minister Wong’s written reply, and other papers relevant to the matter are available for download from: http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/the-wong-fielding-meeting-on-global-warming-documents/

Senator Fielding’s summary of the results of his discussions with Minister Wong can be found here: http://www.stevefielding.com.au/climate_change/.

The Due Diligence Paper has now been released publicly by Senator Fielding’s office (July 3, 2009):  http://jennifermarohasy.com/data/7%20%20Carter-Evans-Franks-Kininmonth%20Due%20Diligence%20on%20Wong-Z%20.pdf

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“YET the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.”  

This extract from a column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman refers specifically to politicians who voted against the cap and trade legislation last Friday in the US House of Representatives.   Read more »

THERE is now a website where, at least theoretically, anyone can download near-real time data on ocean temperatures, salinity and currents for the Australian marine environment.   

The Australian government contributed $52 million to the development of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) developed by the University of Tasmania with support from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research.  According to government information, “support will also be provided for the eMarine Information Infrastructure to store, analyse, retrieve and share data once it has been collected”.

http://www.imos.org.au/

LAST week the International Whaling Commission (IWC) met on the Portuguese island of Madeira and agreed that climate change is a threat to whales.   A decision on the Danish proposal for Greenland to hunt 10 humpback whales a year was postponed.  Australia’s Environment Minister was there and told the meeting that whale-watching is a growing industry worth more than whale hunting.  Ian Mott disagrees:

“THE claim, by Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett, that whales are worth more alive than dead betrays a breathtaking level of economic ignorance and a dangerous penchant for simplistic, “Cargo Cult” panaceas.

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ON Friday President Barrack Obama praised the House of Representatives for passing the ‘Clean Energy and Security Act’.  Everyone agrees that it’s far reaching legislation, and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made mention of the event as a reason for Australia to hurry-up with its own emissions trading laws.  

The US Environment Protection Agency had one of its employees, Alan Carlin, critique the supporting technical documentation for the legislation.  Mr Carlin’s report advised that the scientific hypothesis on which the draft legislation is based is seriously flawed. He lists its failings as: Read more »

ACCORDING to Raymond Harvey: The scientific sceptic, as opposed to the philosophical sceptic, is defined by rational inquiry — someone who investigates with a disposition to be persuaded.

THE Greek word skopein – from which the English word scope derives – means “to observe, aim at, examine.” It is related to the Greek skeptesthai, which means “to look out.” Skepsis and skeptikos are also both Greek and mean “to look; to enquire; to aim.”  Those are the etymological roots of the word sceptic.

Sceptic – or if you’re in the United States, skeptic, the difference purely one of form and not substance – has its origins in the Ancient Greek thinkers who developed arguments which purport to show that knowledge is either impossible (Academic Scepticism) or that there is never sufficient data to tell if knowledge is possible (Pyrrhonian Scepticism).

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IN the documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Al Gore used the tale of a frog in a warming container not jumping out, but rather boiling to death, as a caution against inaction, against letting small changes, small increases in temperature, go unaddressed.   

But what if, since the movie was released in 2006, there has been a small drop in temperature? Read more »

YESTERDAY President Barrack Obama praised the House of Representatives for its “Historic action with the passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act …  It’s a bold and necessary step that holds the promise of creating new industries and millions of new jobs, decreasing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil… Now it’s up to the Senate to take the next step.”  Read more »

There has been criticism of the potential for official weather stations in the USA to record artificially high temperatures because of the changing environments in which they exist, for example, new asphalt, new building or new air conditioning outlets.   Meteorologist, Anthony Watts, has documented evidence of the problem and Canadian academic, Ross McKitrick, has attempted to calculate just how artificially elevated temperatures might be as a consequence.

A reader of this blog, Michael Hammer, recently studied the official data from the US official weather stations and in particular how it is adjusted after it has been collected.   Mr Hammer concludes that the temperature rise profile claimed by the US government is largely if not entirely an artefact of the adjustments applied after the raw data is collected from the weather stations.

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