Tag: Dominion Post

Mother nature’s sons

homer.jpgYesterday, two of NZ’s leading newspapers — Fairfax stablemates The Press and the Dominion Post — featured an exciting story by Press science reporter Paul Gorman. The Press headlined it Climate change down to nature, while the Dom Post opted for the slightly more accurate Nature blamed for warming. Big news, obviously, as Gorman explained in the opening sentence in the DP version:

Nature, not mankind, is responsible for recent climate change, according to new peer-reviewed research likely to send ripples around the world.

The first ripples showed up at Hot Topic on Friday morning, alerting me to this apparently ground-breaking piece of research — a paper in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research titled Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature . And then I saw the author list: McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter. That’s Bob “big lie” Carter, inexpert witness Chris de Freitas, and Aussie “climate analyst” John McLean, as good a cross-section of the southern hemisphere climate crank coterie as you’re likely to find in one journal at one time. And guess what, the paper’s available free of charge from the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition web site [PDF (link now broken, see Update 4 below)], although the AGU want to charge for it. All sorts of interesting questions popped into my mind…

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Sound of silence

jim_salinger.jpg The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has fired climate scientist Jim Salinger for “unauthorised dealings” with the media. Salinger has been one of New Zealand’s leading climate scientists since the 1970s, and his sacking has shocked many in the scientific community. The Dominion Post reports:

The Crown agency’s long-serving principal scientist was dismissed earlier this week, reportedly for trying to help TVNZ’s weatherman Jim Hickey with some “climate-related inquiries” and for doing an interview with Radio New Zealand’s Checkpoint programme without permission.

He said he received a letter in March from management summoning him to a disciplinary meeting for an interview he did with TVNZ in February commenting on Auckland’s hottest day. The interview had not been approved and was labelled “serious misconduct”. He was also reprimanded for talking to TVNZ about glaciers for which he thought he had permission.

I covered the offending glacier story here: it was an excellent piece of journalism, reflecting well on both TV NZ and the NIWA staff working on the survey. Salinger was also one of the five NZ scientists who complained last year about being on Heartland’s list of people whose work didn’t support global warming: a move which gained Jim a lot of support in the NZ media — hardly surprising when for years he’s been one of the main “go to” men for a quotable opinion on climate and weather issues.

NIWA have not commented on the dismissal, and they are unlikely to in the short term given that an employment court case is in the offing. Whatever the ins and outs of employment law, the Crown-owned research institute is going to have to work hard to avoid the suspicion that — in an echo of attempts by the Bush administration to muzzle Jim Hansen — management fired Salinger because he was refusing to be gagged.

The Green Party has already called on NIWA’s shareholding ministers, Wayne Mapp and Bill English, to ask the CRI’s board to investigate the sacking, but Mapp has refused according to the DomPost:

Dr Mapp said he would not intervene. “The matter is an employment dispute, which must be handled by the chief executive and the board,” he said.

I think Mapp has this wrong. Salinger’s dismissal raises questions of free speech and academic freedom, and if the government is to avoid suspicions of censoring inconvenient truths — at a time when cranks are being given time to spout nonsense before the ETS Review committee — then it needs to act swiftly to reaffirm that New Zealand scientists are not being muzzled. The international reputation of our science could be at stake.

See also: Stuff, Herald on Sunday, and for a critical take on the burgeoning role of bureaucrats in NZ science, an opinion piece by Doug Edmeades in Australasian Science this week (via the Science Media Centre).

[Simon & Garfunkel]

Unlike markets, climate won’t bounce back soon

It’s my pleasure to welcome another guest writer to Hot Topic — Peter Barrett, professor of geology at Victoria University, deputy director of the Climate Change Research Institute and former director of VUW’s Antarctic Research Centre. He is also convener of the ANDRILL science advisory panel. Last week, the Dominion Post carried this challenging article from Peter, and as it is not available at the DP web site, he has kindly agreed to allow it to appear as a guest column here. I hope it won’t be the last.

The world economy appears to be heading into the worst recession in 60 years. The nominal wealth of global markets has almost halved in the last couple of months and the United States Government alone is shoring up its banking system with $US7.6 trillion. Commentators expect conditions will be difficult in the next few years and say we need to get the fundamentals right.

Severe downturns have happened before and our society has recovered. Each time, confidence and perception of wealth has grown to exceed tangible assets and credible wealth by a big margin, and the illusion could not be sustained. Each time we had to go back to the fundamentals.

At same time the global ecosystem has suffered from economic growth and rising population. The United Nation’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 found that more than 60 percent of the Earth’s ecosystem services were degraded by overuse and pollution. The importance of ecosystem services to our economic and social well being is now understood as fundamental, though progress is slow.

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When will they ever learn?

homer.jpg“Forget global warming. The cold, hard facts point to another threat on the horizon – severe cooling.” That’s the strapline over an opinion piece in yesterday’s Dominion Post business section (Sunspots spell end of climate myth), contributed by Bryan Leyland, one of the more vocal of our local climate cranks. It’s an astonishing piece, given a splash treatment by the paper. Consider this sentence, given prominence as a pull-out quote by the Post:

Researchers have discovered that warming since 1975 is not caused by greenhouse gases.

That’s news to me. It would be news to anyone with half a brain. So why then is this “fact” not on the front page of the Dom Post, or indeed the world’s newspapers? Because it’s not true. Leyland is making stuff up.

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So it goes

NZETS.jpg The cacophony of lobbying around the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), coupled with high petrol prices, has prompted the government to announce a couple of changes to the scheme. Liquid fuels were supposed to enter the ETS in 2009, but this has now been delayed to 2011, and the phase out of the free allocation of emissions units to big emitters will now be postponed five years until 2018 [Herald, Radio NZ, Dominion Post].

Announcing the changes to the proposed legislation, Helen Clark also released the latest figures for the Kyoto liability:

… the provisional net position is projected to be a deficit of 21.7 million units during the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012). This compares with the projected deficit reported in May 2007 of 45.5 million units, and is a drop of 52 per cent. This means the liability halves from $1 billion to $481.6 million.

When the ETS was announced last year, it was projected that the net liability would be about 22 million units after taking the expected effects of the scheme on emissions into account. The government is clearly confident that high petrol prices will achieve the same effect as the ETS over the two year extension period. That’s a defensible position at the moment, but if fuel prices fall the Kyoto liability could increase. It signals, perhaps, that the government is reasonably confident that petrol prices won’t fall. Or perhaps simply that in an election year contentious new policy is up for grabs. The word pusillanimous springs unbidden to my mind…

The fuel move is getting the most attention, but the five year extension on allocations of free units to big emitters is a direct response to intensive lobbying from those sectors. It will significantly reduce the business costs of cutting emissions in the longer run, but also amounts to an extension of a tax payer subsidy to those businesses. It will be interesting to see how they respond. Looking into my crystal ball, I confidently predict someone will say “it’s a welcome move, but not big enough”.