The Coalition will not fund future drought preparedness measures as part of its agricultural election policy, due out in a fortnight, but will stick with its existing drought assistance measures despite calls for change from State Governments and the National Farmers Federation.
farmonline: ‘Election ’07: Drought preparedness not in Coalition ag policy’
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
Louis Hissink says
November 4, 2007 at 7:36 pmDrought preparedeness measures?
Droughts are natural climate variations which life adapts to, in however many different ways. But climate, when reduced to first principles, is the physical state of the earth’s surface between the land, and here things might become interesting, at some distance above that land surface. (How a surface achieves 3 dimensions is something else again but if you accept the existence of plate tectonics, neutron stars, black holes, dark matter, then such topological possibilities are hardly novel).
Consider the fact that weather stations measure data, based on observations of the site descriptions available at Anthjony Watt’s site (http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/), at about 1 metre above the physical land surface. So what is being measured? The temperature of the weather station or a part of earth’s atmosphere, and then it’s the bottom 1 meter part of it.
Given that the earth’s atmosphere extends some 30 km upwards, give or take, then an aggregation of the surface weather station data isn’t a representatve sample of the atmosphere but of the earth’s solid surface that, for reasons that temporarily escape me, cannot contain a gaseous component. (Surfaces are 2D forms, not 3D ones).
So the global temperature derived from all the surface weather stations is simply a global temperature of those weather station thermometers and not the earth or its overlying atmosphere.
It actually reduces to estimating the temperature of a spherical surface, which is patently a nonesense.
Luke says
November 5, 2007 at 3:46 pmWell Louis given our crops and pastures live at this level (not kms underground or kms up in the air) it may be of some surprise to you that agronomists and water hydrologists can usefully simulate growth of wheat, soya beans, pastures and runoff/dam inflows using these weather stations.
So from all this useless information it appears that science (just somehow struggling through the difficulty and tears) is managing to progress.
Clearly geologists are not trained in biology.
But of course we have satellites that measure various layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere – you might try coming with a solar explanation of how the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere is cooling.