Last weekend’s G8 summit in Heiligendamm was either a great success or an abject failure, depending on who you listen to. The German leader, Angela Merkel, had wanted “her
Gone to the great blue dome: RIP Augie
Augie Auer, the charismatic meteorologist, former TV3 weatherman, and leading light of the NZ CSC, died suddenly last weekend while celebrating his 67th birthday and 35th wedding anniversary in Melbourne. [Stuff, Herald, tributes]. I hope he will be remembered for his service to weather forecasting in New Zealand and his superb TV presentation skills, rather than his idiosyncratic views on climate. The world (and this blog) will be the poorer for his loss.
Shooting fish in a barrel
Sometimes the antics of New Zealand’s band of climate cranks, the self-styled Climate Science Coalition, reduce me to tears. More often they make me laugh. Today’s example of their tomfoolery [PDF] has had me chuckling for hours. Dr Vincent Gray, a former coal researcher and leading light of the NZ CSC, hasn’t published any peer-reviewed papers on climate science (he’s had a few in Energy & Environment, but that doesn’t count). He claims to be a “climate consultant” and an “€œexpert reviewer for the IPCC”, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from spouting nonsense. His latest paper claims:
It is quite impossible to obtain a statistically or scientifically acceptable estimate of mean global temperature or its variability over time, from readings on the earth’s surface.
He then proceeds to criticise the global surface temperature record, which seems to be becoming fashionable in certaincircles. On the one hand…
The oceans constitute 71% of the earth’€™s surface, but sea surface temperature measurements suffer from error to a greater degree than measurements on land.
…but he then proceeds to use satellite records of ocean temperatures, excluding land, because…
The “€œLand” [sic: a typo, he means ocean] record is shown in Figure 2 as it ignores variability specific to land surfaces, but still applies to 71% of the earth.
Funnily enough, he doesn’t find much of a warming trend. If he had used the latest combined land and ocean data he would have had to admit that the satellite record showed warming at 0.18ºK per decade – slap in the middle of all modern estimates of increases in the global average. But he ignores that inconvenient truth and soldiers on, to finish with a magnificent assertion completely unsupported by the preceding argument:
Reliable global, regional and local temperature records show that temperatures variability is cyclic, with a period of about 60 years. The temperature does not display a distinguishable €œtrend. The most reliable records show peak temperatures around 1940 and 2005 and low temperatures around 1910 and 1970. These records are incompatible with a belief that there is a distinguishable upwards €œtrend€™ caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
So if we ignore all the evidence that the world is getting warmer, that means that it can’t be getting warmer. I wonder which windmill Dr Vincent will tilt at next? And who is his Sancho Panza? Not the august personage himself, surely?
Climate change: sex change
NZ’s iconic tuatara are threatened by climate change. I’ve got the full story in Hot Topic (the book), but Reuters have beaten me to press. Tuatara eggs incubated above 21.5ºC become males, and climate change is already producing a sex imbalance in the population. Male tuatara on a predator-free island near the top of the South Island already outnumber females by 1.7 times, reports Victoria University researcher Jennifer Moore. Full story on TVNZ and the UK Telegraph.
Aussie carbon trading: big bikkies for grandad?
John Howard’s Task Group on Emissions Trading has produced its report [PDF]. It concludes that an emissions trading regime is the way forward for Australia, but fails to suggest targets. It’s a very useful overview of how carbon trading mechanisms might be made to work, but has clearly been hamstrung by the current political realities in Australia. It remains to be seen how John Howard, with his noted aversion to targets for greenhouse gas reductions will handle setting up a trading scheme if re-elected – or how he will be able to ignore section 7.2.1.
Adopting a credible long-term aspirational goal for national emissions reduction is critical. It sets the framework for Australia’s overall abatement efforts. Such a goal could be described in terms of the percentage reduction in emissions from a particular point in time, or in terms of the maximum number of tonnes of CO2-e that Australia is aiming to emit by a particular year.
Some Aussie press coverage here and here. Science Alert commentary here. The Australian Stock Exchange is slavering at the bit.
The scope for handouts to industry through grandfathering, as has effectively happened in Europe, is huge. BBC Radio 4’s File On Four claims that the EU’s carbon trading scheme has increased electricity bills, given a windfall to power companies and failed to cut greenhouse gases:
Power generators received their allowances free of charge but were allowed to reflect the value of those in increased prices to customers, as if the companies had actually had to buy the allowances. Energywatch believes this increased electricity bills by about 7% in 2005. And according to one government estimate, that delivered windfall profits of up to £1.3bn to the generators in that year – higher than environmental campaigners had claimed last year.
No Right Turn has an interesting post on how this problem might be addressed in NZ, warning that badly set up emissions trading schemes amount to taxpayer handouts to emitters.