a busy week...
Its been a busy week in science, climate, and high-school teaching.
A principal has apologized to a 12 year old boy for throwing faeces at him, explaining it as a "momentary lack of judgement". Teachers everywhere understand. The only remaining question is where, exactly, did she get the faeces?
Returning to our previous story, the PM John Howard has struck back at the whole EU after it slammed him on climate change.
“I can really not understand why Australia has not ratified Kyoto,” said the EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.
Quoth the PM:
“You've got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having signed Kyoto yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well in meeting them,” Mr Howard told ABC Radio today.
“Our answer to spokesman for the European Union is look to your own affairs, get your countries complying with the targets you have proclaimed.”
He noted Australia is having no problem meeting its emission targets because it has none.
----
Furthermore one notes the bloated corpuscule Piers Ackerman from Daily Telegraph has another 'climate change is not happening' rant on the weekend. Piers is of course a long time critic of climate change science since his gaseous methane emissions are a major contributor to the Australian greenhouse gas problem.
The column is bad science, and rather counter-productive. The bottom line is he's playing up uncertainties, and presented smidgins of truth half cloaked in facts to present the illusion of a controversy.
Whats worse, he derides the climate modellers without any attempt to understand their work, or the models, and what they predict, and their uncertainties. He just throws out a whole branch of science because its done on 'computers'. Well newsflash Piers: the world is a complicated place, and the maths behind these models even more so, the only way to get any sort of intelligent handle on the problem is to do computer simulations. Doesn't mean they're always right, depending on the assumptions in the models, but it is a hell of a better approach than misrepresentative newspaper articles with lots of exclamation marks! Yeah?!
!
A brief perusal of the editorials on Nature and Science - the two leading science journals in the world - show no hint of a controversy over the mans' contribution to climate change. In fact, the recent editorials unaminously slam climate change sceptics over the harm they are causing by introducing false doubts by mispresenting the science.
There is complete agreement by working climate scientists over man's contribution to climate change. There is no real debate.
By working scientists - I'm talking about guys who publish, go to real conferences, and make up most of the international climate change panel (ICCP), and thus are behind the Kyoto protocol, the Stern report, the ICCP recommendation, and the latest EU comments. Banging heads with these guys is going against the largest flow of consensus you're ever likely to see in the scientific community, which by its nature is quite fractured.
The dissenters - and there are always a few - are either 1) pig headed old professors who have lost anything resembling mental agility in the face of new data - and sadly there are a few of them in science, or 2) fruitloops, and not serious scientists, ie the 'fringe science' community or 3) somehow paid by oil companies - and there are a lot of these guys, and have historically been the greatest critics of anthropogenic climate change.
His stupid 'no average change in 25 years'. Way to short. Look at the last century. 1998 was the hottest year on record (also an El Nino year). His comment that the temperature has plateaued out? Wait till the next El Nino again Piers, a man of your commensurate bulk is going to suffer.
Ice age? Yes, we're meant to be heading towards one. Mankind's contribution has completely tipped the scales though so who knows where we're headed. It depends on what we do now.
And what is this crap about firestick farming? I mean, this is exactly the sort of obfuscating red herring I'm talking about, when Pier's isnt eating them he's smattering them all over his article. Firestick farming might burn a few trees on a local scale every so often (even that changed the landscape/climate and fauna of Australia). Our coal plants are burning millions of years of concentrated vegetation. Its orders of magnitude difference. Firestick farming is a piss in the ocean compared with what the coal plants rip through.
Bottom line: 5 degrees temperature is not the end of the world. Man will survive it. The earth has had bigger fluctuations in the past. BUT: you will get the droughts. Thus the fires. The cyclones. Etc. Be ready for it, cause we have kinda screwed our water situation so far. THIS IS GOING TO COST MONEY.
Ditto the Barrier Reef. Corals as a phylum might survive. But the Barrier Reef will be royally screwed. Coral gets bleached, falls apart... au revoir Queensland tourism. And thus a significant fraction of Australia's GDP (4-5% comes from tourism). Piers seems quite happy to see the Great Barrier Reef go back to being a lifeless plain. But me and a lot of other Aussies are not to happy with Piers severe inertia to doing anything (which is, coincidentally, related to one's mass....).
This isn't considering the effect rising sealevels will have on water-front properties. Bangladesh and the Pacific Island nations are up for a wild time.
So, to sum it up, it is happening, and it will cost money - lots - even if its not the end of the world as we know it. But surely by acting to mitigate the excursions, which is within our power to do, we are at the very least acting in good economic sense. At the worse, we critically push our planets into a state like Venus, which is a greenhouse effect gone very bad. 400C at the surface kind of bad. I'm not sure even Mr Ackerman's impressive girth will protect him from that sort of temperature rise.
End rant.
In other news, they are doing strange things to penguins here. Ostensibly to test their heart rates (explained here), but I think its to train them to walk on land after the Ice shelfs break up.
A principal has apologized to a 12 year old boy for throwing faeces at him, explaining it as a "momentary lack of judgement". Teachers everywhere understand. The only remaining question is where, exactly, did she get the faeces?
Returning to our previous story, the PM John Howard has struck back at the whole EU after it slammed him on climate change.
“I can really not understand why Australia has not ratified Kyoto,” said the EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.
Quoth the PM:
“You've got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having signed Kyoto yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well in meeting them,” Mr Howard told ABC Radio today.
“Our answer to spokesman for the European Union is look to your own affairs, get your countries complying with the targets you have proclaimed.”
He noted Australia is having no problem meeting its emission targets because it has none.
----
Furthermore one notes the bloated corpuscule Piers Ackerman from Daily Telegraph has another 'climate change is not happening' rant on the weekend. Piers is of course a long time critic of climate change science since his gaseous methane emissions are a major contributor to the Australian greenhouse gas problem.
The column is bad science, and rather counter-productive. The bottom line is he's playing up uncertainties, and presented smidgins of truth half cloaked in facts to present the illusion of a controversy.
Whats worse, he derides the climate modellers without any attempt to understand their work, or the models, and what they predict, and their uncertainties. He just throws out a whole branch of science because its done on 'computers'. Well newsflash Piers: the world is a complicated place, and the maths behind these models even more so, the only way to get any sort of intelligent handle on the problem is to do computer simulations. Doesn't mean they're always right, depending on the assumptions in the models, but it is a hell of a better approach than misrepresentative newspaper articles with lots of exclamation marks! Yeah?!
!
A brief perusal of the editorials on Nature and Science - the two leading science journals in the world - show no hint of a controversy over the mans' contribution to climate change. In fact, the recent editorials unaminously slam climate change sceptics over the harm they are causing by introducing false doubts by mispresenting the science.
There is complete agreement by working climate scientists over man's contribution to climate change. There is no real debate.
By working scientists - I'm talking about guys who publish, go to real conferences, and make up most of the international climate change panel (ICCP), and thus are behind the Kyoto protocol, the Stern report, the ICCP recommendation, and the latest EU comments. Banging heads with these guys is going against the largest flow of consensus you're ever likely to see in the scientific community, which by its nature is quite fractured.
The dissenters - and there are always a few - are either 1) pig headed old professors who have lost anything resembling mental agility in the face of new data - and sadly there are a few of them in science, or 2) fruitloops, and not serious scientists, ie the 'fringe science' community or 3) somehow paid by oil companies - and there are a lot of these guys, and have historically been the greatest critics of anthropogenic climate change.
His stupid 'no average change in 25 years'. Way to short. Look at the last century. 1998 was the hottest year on record (also an El Nino year). His comment that the temperature has plateaued out? Wait till the next El Nino again Piers, a man of your commensurate bulk is going to suffer.
Ice age? Yes, we're meant to be heading towards one. Mankind's contribution has completely tipped the scales though so who knows where we're headed. It depends on what we do now.
And what is this crap about firestick farming? I mean, this is exactly the sort of obfuscating red herring I'm talking about, when Pier's isnt eating them he's smattering them all over his article. Firestick farming might burn a few trees on a local scale every so often (even that changed the landscape/climate and fauna of Australia). Our coal plants are burning millions of years of concentrated vegetation. Its orders of magnitude difference. Firestick farming is a piss in the ocean compared with what the coal plants rip through.
Bottom line: 5 degrees temperature is not the end of the world. Man will survive it. The earth has had bigger fluctuations in the past. BUT: you will get the droughts. Thus the fires. The cyclones. Etc. Be ready for it, cause we have kinda screwed our water situation so far. THIS IS GOING TO COST MONEY.
Ditto the Barrier Reef. Corals as a phylum might survive. But the Barrier Reef will be royally screwed. Coral gets bleached, falls apart... au revoir Queensland tourism. And thus a significant fraction of Australia's GDP (4-5% comes from tourism). Piers seems quite happy to see the Great Barrier Reef go back to being a lifeless plain. But me and a lot of other Aussies are not to happy with Piers severe inertia to doing anything (which is, coincidentally, related to one's mass....).
This isn't considering the effect rising sealevels will have on water-front properties. Bangladesh and the Pacific Island nations are up for a wild time.
So, to sum it up, it is happening, and it will cost money - lots - even if its not the end of the world as we know it. But surely by acting to mitigate the excursions, which is within our power to do, we are at the very least acting in good economic sense. At the worse, we critically push our planets into a state like Venus, which is a greenhouse effect gone very bad. 400C at the surface kind of bad. I'm not sure even Mr Ackerman's impressive girth will protect him from that sort of temperature rise.
In other news, they are doing strange things to penguins here. Ostensibly to test their heart rates (explained here), but I think its to train them to walk on land after the Ice shelfs break up.
posted by code_monkey_craig at 3:55 PM
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