By Jennifer Marohasy, Politics and Environment Blog
In an opinion piece entitled ‘Our hot, dry future’ published by Melbourne’s The Age newspaper on October 6, 2008, Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, suggested global warming was responsible for the current long drought in Melbourne and that there was worse to come. I don’t think the article was very convincing. I am annoyed that it didn’t include any real data. While Dr Jones claimed that “We know that over the past 11 years Melbourne’s rainfall has been about 20% below the long-term average”, he didn’t explain what period this “long-term average” covers and what is the relevance of the last 11 years given it is accepted that over this period there has been a dominance of El Nino, and therefore dry conditions.
Key Australian Institutions have claimed for some time that we have a water crisis because of climate change.
Indeed in 2005 CSIRO published a “Melbourne Water Climate Change Study” claiming “the greater Melbourne Region has had its lowest rainfall on record compared to all other periods of similar length.” But as blogger, Warwick Hughes, showed some time ago, the period chosen was just 92 months, from October 1996 to May 2004. In order to put their statement in some context Mr Hughes graphed high quality rainfall data for the weather station closest to Melbourne, Yan Yean, back to January 1863 - and he has just updated the chart to the end of September 2008.
See larger image here
The chart indicates that Melbourne experiences dry periods every so often and that the current drought is similar in magnitude to the droughts of 1896, 1925 and 1945. The chart showing 145 years of data, does not support the claim, made by Dr Jones in his article in Melbourne’s The Age, that there has been recent unusual climate change in Melbourne. Indeed periods of drought and flood are a natural hazard. Read more and see links to part I and II here.
By Claudia Rosett, Forbes
It’s not just income taxes that might trash the dreams of Joe the Plumber. Ready or not, Joe and the rest of us are also about to get mugged by the commissars of climate change. On this, I’ve got a bipartisan beef, since both John McCain and Barack Obama have bought into the panicked Al Gore storyline that the earth has a man-made “fever.” Both candidates are promising to meet it with dramatic and costly new forms of government control.
This comes even as Europe, after its fling with the Kyoto treaty, is backing off from grand pledges to cut carbon dioxide emissions, having decided that the whole thing is too expensive. But United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls climate change the “defining issue of our time,” and the U.N. early last year announced that scientific “consensus” had been reached: The climate is in crisis, and it’s man-made. At the U.N. this has morphed into calls for wealthy countries to choke their own productivity and compensate the rest of the world for the weather.
So the plan now is that America, along with its bailouts and other burdens, will sacrifice to the global climate gods. Nevermind that an emissions cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate in June, sunk by the titanic price tag and regulatory overload it would have entailed. America’s top politicians, not entirely averse to finding ever-new ways to control and plunder the electorate, are still chugging the climate-change Kool-Aid. Once this starts, where does it stop? Carbon is the basis of life itself; carbon dioxide is exhaled with every breath. Regulating and taxing such matters is a road map to state meddling in every aspect of daily life.
And is the alarm even justified? U.N. proclamations to the contrary, there are numerous dissenting scientists. Among the dissenters is MIT professor of atmospheric sciences Richard Lindzen. In a recent, richly documented paper, he warns that the huge shift over the past half century toward government funding of scientific research has “led to extreme vulnerability to political manipulation.” He argues that today’s climate “consensus” is much more a product of politics than of science. Big government begets a push toward more of the same. Grants, prizes and jobs go chiefly to those who produce what eco-activists and U.N.-o-crats want to hear.
Who are these folks setting the climate agenda? Most Americans have never heard of Yvo de Boer, and certainly never voted for him. De Boer is a Dutchman, appointed by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006 to head the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
De Boer is not a scientist; his bio says he has a “technical degree in social work.” Before joining the UNFCCC in the 1990s, he worked in the Dutch ministry of housing. These days, de Boer jets around the world presiding over conferences--such as last year’s two-week climate summit at a Bali beach resort--aimed at creating a global “climate change regime.” This regime rests on schemes for massive international wealth transfers, with multilateral bureaucracies calculating who owes, who pays and who gets special breaks--while related arms of these proliferating outfits crank out reports in which “science” is invoked to justify the entire set-up.
Among world leaders, there is almost no one left with the courage and vision to challenge any of this. A rare exception is Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who in the 1980s struggled to free his country from Soviet domination and is now sounding the alarm about the growing global tyranny of climate edicts. Last year he published a short book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles. In the subtitle of this book, he asks: “Which is endangered: climate or freedom?” It’s a pity that in America, a country built on free speech and free markets, neither presidential candidate seems willing to take a cue from Klaus. By now, the real question on climate is: Which candidate, once elected, is most likely to back off the campaign promises enough to leave America free to breathe? Read more here.
TEHRAN, Iran - Russia, Iran and Qatar made the first serious moves Tuesday toward forming an OPEC-style cartel on natural gas, raising concerns that Moscow could boost its influence over energy markets spanning from Europe to South Asia. Such an alliance would have little direct impact on the United States, which imports virtually no natural gas from Russia or the other nations.
But Washington and Western allies worry that closer strategic ties between Russia and Iran could hinder efforts to isolate Tehran over its nuclear ambitions. In addition, the United States opposes a proposed Iranian gas pipeline to Pakistan and India, key allies. In Europe - which counts on Russia for nearly half of its natural gas imports - any cartel controlled by Moscow poses a threat to supply and pricing.
Russia, which most recently came into confrontation with the West over its five-day war with Georgia in August, has been accused of using its hold on energy supplies to bully its neighbors, particularly Ukraine. Moscow cut natural gas exports to the former Soviet republic over a price dispute during the dead of winter in 2006 - a cutoff that caused disruptions to European nations further down the pipeline.
“Big decisions were made,” said Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari. His Qatari counterpart, Abdulla Bin Hamad al-Attiya, said at least two more meetings were needed to finalize an accord, according to the Iranian Oil Ministry’s Web site. No timeframe was given. Calling the grouping the “big gas troika,” the chief executive of Russia’s state-controlled energy company Gazprom, Alexei Miller, said it would meet three or four times a year. “We are consolidating the largest gas reserves in the world, the general strategic interests and - what is very important - the high potential for cooperation on three-party projects,” Miller said.
Liquefied natural gas - a rapidly growing segment of the market - could be traded as a commodity similar to oil at some point in the future, and the move by Russia, Iran and Qatar appears to anticipate that, said Konstantin Batunin, an analyst with Moscow’s Alfa Bank. Gazprom, the Russian state energy company, is looking to make the U.S. one of its prime markets for liquefied natural gas, and sent senior executives to Alaska last week to discuss energy projects. See more here. See more also on Russia and Energy here.