Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Climate Change

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Rita hit the US mainland (near Port Arthur, Texas) as a category 3 hurricane last night. This will put Rita in the US National Hurricane Centres ‘major hurricane’ category.

It is starting to really look like there has been a recent significant increase in the number and intensity of big storms hitting the North Atlantic basin.

I thought the recent paper at Tech Central Station was interesting from this perspective. If you want to keep arguing the relevance of this paper and about numbers and intensity of hurricanes there is a long thread at this blog here.

Some have suggested ‘it’ is all to do with anthropogenic global warming (AGW), others that is is a return to ‘the conditions’ of the 1940s.

A bit has been said about weather patterns changing in Australia after 1976. This is when some claim it really started to get dry in the south west of Australia.

I had a look at the Bureau of Meterology time series rainfall data the other day and noticed that there was a spike this autumn for the SW, View image .

The spike didn’t carry through to winter. But it will be interesting to see what this year’s total rainfall for the SW looks like.

I have also noted water allocations keep increasing for irrigators in the Murray Darling Basin. I gather places like Mildura are looking green, as is much of western Queensland.

Could we be in for some wetter years?

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Comments

  1. Louis Hissink says

    I received a note from Europe on what a topp climate scientist thought about the formation of hurricans. It was in Dutch and basically it recognises that hurricanes and cyclones are associated with ocean temperatures higher than usual – 26C ?. No argument there of course.

    Getting from a warm sea to the development of a vortex in the air, which then grows in strength to develop into a hurricane remains a complete mystery.

    The association of lightning etc with hurricanes is based on the idea that the cyclonic movement “somehow” generates electrical fields, except no one has physically shown this.

    On the other hand from laboratory plasma experiments we know that Birkeland currents, over time, develop into twisting vorticies and hence into cyclones or hurricanes.

    The source of the latest hurricanes should not be looked for within humanity but at the total earth-sun-solar electrical circuit.

    This however is new ground and effectivelya paradigm shift in science. Some of us are quietly writing up the science on this, since we realise this paradigm shift will not happen in our lifetime.

    But maybe it could – unlike prophets of religion, economists and climate changers, we reject any notion that we can predict the future.

  2. Phil Done says

    Louis – sounds fascinating – can you tell us who the researchers are and introduce us to the literature on the subject.

    And how would you experiment/model/prove such a hypothesis….

  3. Louis Hissink says

    Phil,

    I have given plenty of links to plasma science etc on Henry Thornton over time but http://www.thunderbolts.info is a special web site ( a firewall sort of) which puts the ideas into layman language. The named scientists are retired and/or not in the “system”.

    These are the firstline of the cannon fodder. Behind them, quite anonymous, are big gun scientists who cannot be named because their funding will be cut.

    I suggest you google Eric Lerner, Hanne’s Alfven (now deceased) for extra clues.

    I am working on Plasma geology but it is a hobby at present as I am too busy with a company float. However I have am involved with the people behind Thunderbolts as the only geoscientist. The rest are electrical engineers, physcists, astronomers.

    As for the experimentation of this hypothesis – it has been done in the plasma phsyics area. We instantly recognise the phenomena and because plasma effects are scalable, what is observed in the lab can be extrapolated to the earth, solar system and galaxy.

    You should spend some time studying the articles on thunderbolts first though, and I suspect many of your questions would be answered.

  9. Louis Hissink says

    Those of us in the geosciences have somewhat mixed feelings over Tim Flannery.

    Having read his “The Future Eaters” in which he explained that a particular sea bat in New Zealand arrived from Peru by “flying” over the ocean against the trade-winds, makes him a standard geological uniformitarian in which implausible miracles are invoked to explain observations.

    Tim’s problem, as for most climate changers, is that he does not understand that the earth is still getting out of the last mini-ice age, so of course it is warming! What we don’t understand is how the planet got cold.

    Actually I am still waiting for our erudite critics here to explain how Greenland froze up circa 14th Century.

    And to add another problem, the frozen remains of a Mammoth found in Siberia became frozen 3,500 years ago. Before that its environment was in the hipsithermal, but mammoths became extinct 12,000 years ago, then there is no plausible mechanism how such a carcass could remain unaffected by putrefaction and destruction during that hipsithermal. Obvious conclusion is that Mammoths were alive 3,500 years ago.

  10. Davey Gam Esq. says

    Jen,
    With regard to SW Australia rainfall, I noted in my diary that the ABC news on Sunday 22 May predicted a ‘drier than average’ winter. So far, 2005 has been wetter than usual, and it is raining quite heavily outside as I write. I think my stone fruit will be a disaster this year, due to cancelled flight plans for bees. Could this be another example of declining ‘beeodiversity’ due to climate change?