Australia, when Europeans arrived, consisted of a series of biota highly adapted to what we now call hazard reduction burning. The reason is that this is what the aborigines had been practicing for 50,000 years or so.

They were greatly assisted in this by the existence in Australia of the “The Fire Tree”, the eucalypt. The eucalypt promotes fire and is resistant to fire, so that in a regime of constant burning, eucalypts have a higher survival rate and you tend to get the type of monoculture remarked on by many early scientists, including Charles Darwin.

Since the advent of European man in Australia, we have, by preventing the Aboriginal practice of Fire-stick Farming, changed the landscape.

More here by Peter Stitt: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/hazard-reduction-burning.pdf [PDF, 109 KB]

The media has recently been reporting apparently unprecedented heat in Central Australia in the context of human-caused climate change. But is the current heat wave, with extended periods of days above 40^oC at Alice Springs really unprecedented? To answer this question it is necessary to examine the data.

There are two sites at Alice Springs for which readily accessible temperature data are available. The first is the Alice Springs Post Office commencing in 1878 and ceasing in 1953; the other is the Alice Springs airport commencing in 1941 and currently the official observing site for Alice Springs. The sites are about 10 km apart; the difference in January monthly mean maximum temperatures between the sites during the period of common observations (1943-53) was 0.2^oC with the airport being the warmer of the two.

For the airport site the January monthly mean maximum temperature for all years of record (1942-2012) is 36.2^oC. The monthly mean January maximum temperature for all years (1879-1953) at the Post Office is 0.3^oC cooler at 35.9^oC. The impression is that, when combined, we have a relatively homogeneous maximum temperature record for Alice Springs that spans 134 years.

The airport site is the basis for conclusions being drawn that warming has occurred during the second half of the 20th century. The 95th percentile for the monthly mean maximum temperature data is 39.0^oC; five years exceeded this value making the hottest Januarys 1994, 1999, 2004, 2006 and 2008, all in recent decades. The warmest year (2006 with a monthly mean of 40.0^oC) started with 12 consecutive days above 40^oC and with a subsequent 4 days above 40^oC. To date, 2013 is up with these previously hot months having experienced the first 14 days with temperatures reaching 40^oC or above. On these data alone one might conclude central Australia has been getting hotter.

The Post Office data, however, show a quite different picture. The 95th percentile value is 39.3^oC, or 0.3^oC warmer than for the airport. The hottest years from the Post Office record were 1879, 1881, 1887 and 1881, all in the late 19th century. The hottest year in the Post Office record was 1887 and had 11 days above 40^oC, a brief respite then another 10 days above 40^oC. Taken in isolation the Post Office record would suggest a very warm late 19th century with a cooling trend since.

When we plot the monthly mean data for both sites an extended pattern of cooling followed by warming emerges. Temperatures are now only recovering to the values of the late 19th century.

It is unfortunate that the Australian government has not considered it sufficiently important to digitise and make publicly accessible all of the meteorological records from earlier years. The Bureau of Meteorology website has a range of important statistics about changing climate but most are generated from data subsequent to 1910 and based on a digitised selection of those recorded. As a consequence, statements based on the post-1910 data that suggest an ongoing warming trend are incomplete and likely misleading.

There is fragmentary accessible data (such as the above for Alice Springs) and much anecdotal evidence to suggest that during the late 19th century over central Australia, western New South Wales and South West Queensland the temperatures were as warm as or warmer than for recent decades. Without ready access to the existing earlier meteorological data a faulty picture of a warming Australian climate is portrayed in official statements. However, based on the Alice Springs data, a coming period of cooling cannot be discounted.

William Kininmonth
Kew, Vic 3101
Australia

The Carbon Sense Coalition has created “The Gorbel Prize for Green Policies that have Inconvenient Outcomes”.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that so many green policies that appear to have useful environmental goals fail to analyse properly the long-term unforeseen consequences.

Quote:
Green politicians need to learn Newton’s Law of Government Regulations: – “Whenever government legislates to force an economic outcome, the long term effect will be equal and opposite to that intended.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of green politics, where laws designed to help the environment are harming the environment. To publicise this stupidity, the Carbon Sense Coalition has created “The Gorbel Prize for Green Policies that have Inconvenient Outcomes”.

The winner of the Inaugural Gorbel Prize is the UK government whose green policies aim to make it uneconomic to burn coal. So the tax-payer funded Green Investment Bank has loaned £100 million to help convert the huge Drax coal-burning power station in Yorkshire to burning “sustainable biomass”. This is part of a huge finance package of one billion pounds to get the biomass green tick, earn renewable energy subsidies, and avoid the need to buy carbon credits.

Where do they plan to get the “sustainable biomass”? Each year 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips will be imported from North American forests to replace 4.5 Mt of coal.

The land required to produce wood at this rate is immense – about three million acres of forest per year.

Also, wood is less dense than coal with less energy per tonne and a greater volume per tonne. Thus a greater tonnage and a far greater volume of wood have to be handled to get the same energy. This huge volume of wood has to be harvested, hauled, chipped, dried, trucked, shipped and stored using more carbon fuels – all to produce more expensive electricity.

There is one real benefit from the scheme. When the whole process is considered, using wood will put more carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere than using coal. This will make the forests grow faster.

The same goofy green policies that have pushed Drax into burning forests also apply in Australia. Maybe wood chips from our carbon credit forests will soon fuel Yallourn or Hazelwood power stations?

Such green stupidity will take us back to the BC era (before coal) when forests and hillsides were stripped bare of trees to fuel stoves, heaters, boilers, charcoal makers and smelters.

We would all be better off if Drax burned coal, produced cheap electricity, saved those forests and, to satisfy green dogma, planted a token forest of new trees.

For those who find the above unbelievable, here is one reference:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/biggest-english-polluter-spends-1-billion-to-burn-wood-energy.html

Another:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290444/Madness-How-pay-billions-electricity-bills-Britains-biggest-power-station-switch-coal-wood-chips–wont-help-planet-jot.html

And here is a detailed report on combustion products from carbon fuels:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/coal-combustion.pdf

Nominations are invited for future recipients of the Gorbel Prize.

Meanwhile, Al Gore gets $100 million from Big Oil. See:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/010313-639260-gore-helps-oil-financed-anti-semitic-platform.htm

More:

• It’s Official – Carbon dioxide is non-Toxic
• Hobbling the Competition
• “Blue Skies are Falling” – a new climate soap opera
• Greedy Gas Giants Gazump Gullible Greens
• Climate Policies create Costly Electricity
• It’s Summer, Stupid, and it’s Usually Hot
• Count your Blessings – a Fairy Story
• The Last Word
• Lord Christopher Monckton is returning to Australia and New Zealand

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gorbel-prize.pdf [PDF, 147KB]

Keywords: Gorbel Prize, Drax burning wood for electricity, costs of green energy, announcing climate disasters, gas giants gazump greens, electricity costs, heat wave alarms, energy blessings, Christopher Monckton.

Carbon is the essential building block for all living things.

But life cannot exist without energy.

The primary energy of the solar system is nuclear energy – it powers the sun which floods the Earth with solar radiation; other nuclear reactions release heat deep within the planet. But solar energy alone cannot create or sustain life.

Earth’s primeval atmosphere had three natural gases that contained the essential ingredients for the first plant life – carbon dioxide, the food for plants; water, the drink for plants; and ammonia, which probably supported the first primitive life forms. It also had methane, the first natural (non-fossil) hydro-carbon fuel. Ancient atmospheres had far more methane and carbon dioxide than is present today (but no runaway global warming).

Life emerged in water when primitive plants using solar energy and the magic of photosynthesis took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to create sugars, fats and proteins in their leaves, stems, roots, seeds and fruits. Their exhaust product was another natural gas – oxygen.

Millions of years passed, and slowly the plants consumed carbon dioxide and added oxygen to the atmosphere.

Primitive animals then evolved; they used oxygen to extract carbon energy stored in plants. They consumed these carbon fuels and exhausted carbon dioxide. Life is truly a carbon equation.

Carbon fuels such as wood, biomass, coal and oil are essentially preserved organic materials that store solar energy. When burnt in air they release stored energy and exhaust the same valuable by-product – carbon dioxide.

The human race depends totally on carbon based foods that are derived from the gas of life, carbon dioxide, plus nitrogen, minerals and water. And since the invention of engines, humans have come to depend on reliable, efficient, energy-dense, portable carbon fuels to grow, harvest, transport, refrigerate, process, distribute and cook food. The exhaust product from all of these engines is an important stimulant to the growth of all plants.

Without carbon dioxide, no life would exist. And without carbon fuels, modern cities would starve within weeks.

A tax on carbon is thus a tax on life.

Viv Forbes

By Mike Williamson
12 January 2013

There has been much comment on our summer heatwave. This prompted a search for the history of temperatures in S.E. Queensland.

The longest continuous record of local temperatures was from Amberley: the data set was begun in late 1941 and is still active.

See: http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_nccObsCode=36&p_display_type=dataFile&p_startYear=&p_c=&p_stn_num=040004

The record shows that the highest monthly mean maximum temperature for the month of January in each year was way back in 1942 and has not been surpassed since. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1 (click to enlarge)

The linear trend for the years 1942 to 2012, shows is a slight rise in the temperature trend. This is not surprising as the Earth’s temperatures have had several rising phases ever since the last Ice Age ended over 10,000 years ago.

The Amberley data shows that the highest mean maximum January temperatures appear to be fairly similar when they periodically occur. However the lower mean maximums appear to be creating the very slight upward trend.

This does not then appear to support the man-made global warming hypothesis since if carbon dioxide is retaining heat in the atmosphere it should do so at all temperature levels, whether high or low. If carbon dioxide is causing the heating, why is carbon dioxide rising steadily whereas temperatures are not?

A Short Observation on Bushfires

Grass, peat, leaves and timber all ignite at temperatures well above 40^oC. Even highly inflammable, easily ignitable, kerosene needs a spark exceeding 200^oC for combustion to be initiated. Therefore heat wave temperatures cannot cause fires. Something else ignited them. Once ignited, hot temperatures and high winds make the fires more severe, but something else ignited them.

[Mike Williamson is a Graduate Fuel Technologist/Chemical Engineer, with experience in minerals processing and applications of coal technology. He is now retired and has no connection with industry of any kind. As a self-funded retiree he relies upon lifetime savings for his quality of life in retirement. No one paid him or asked him to produce this.]

Click to enlarge

Alice in Wonderland Science
Our energy and environment deserve better – in South Africa and Qatar

Kelvin Kemm

A few weeks ago, perhaps as a prologue to the “global warming disaster” convention in Doha, Qatar, South Africa’s Department of Environment Affairs took out a full-page advertisement in our country’s newspapers, promoting National Marine Week.

The ad showed a map of the Antarctic continent, from above the pole, surrounded by the vast blue Southern Ocean. It also promoted South Africa’s new Antarctic research vessel, SA Agulhas II.

The advertisement’s text mentioned the massive Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which is responsible for distributing vital nutrients to the world’s oceans. It noted that the truly massive quantities of phytoplankton found in the ocean are vital marine building blocks in ocean processes. All that is true, and I certainly applaud efforts to protect the environment and promote National Marine Week and our country’s research efforts.

But then, sadly, the ad’s discussion of physics content went off the rails. Referring to phytoplankton, it said “these microscopic creatures also use carbon to create energy.” Wrong!
(more…)

Well, the verdict is in on Global Warming, and guess what? There isn’t any!!! So says the British Met Office in a new report, issued quietly and without any publicity last month.

In fact, they sheepishly admitted that there has been “no measurable increase in Global Temperature during the last 16 years”. If you missed this story when it broke, you can read the full article at the following link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released–chart-prove-it.html

By Carl Brehmer

“Evidence of widespread control of fire dates to approximately 125,000 years.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

Many people assert that environmental extremists want to take civilization back to a pre-industrial state some 150-200 years ago, but the achievement of a “carbon free economy” would take humanity back at least 125,000 years before the discovery and control of fire, because that is the source of the carbon dioxide emissions that have now been declared “pollution.” Even as the somewhat obscure term “cap-and-trade” is a little more clear when called a “carbon tax”, even more clarity would be achieved by calling it a tax on the use of fire, because that is what it is. In their role as fuels, all hydrocarbons are useless until they are burned, which produces the energy that has fuelled human progress and provided the following benefits, which even the environmental extremists and various “rent takers” take for granted:

1) Light; even kerosene lanterns burn fossil fuel and produce carbon dioxide.

2) Heat; ask the victims of hurricane Sandy or anybody who experiences a power outage about the value of heat. Even primitive people use fire for heat.

3) Communication; all modern forms of communication depend upon the power provided by the energy derived from fire.

4) Rapid travel; what form of travel today isn’t powered by the use of fire? Trains, planes and automobiles are all powered with fire.

5) Escape from countless hours of physical labour. Prior to the discovery and use of fire, especially that used to produce electricity, disparate groups of human being were stuck in separate small communities around the world forced to spend most of their time in physical labour.

6) Inventions such as the modern computer and the rapid, worldwide communication network, which includes cell phones, e-mail and the internet would not have been developed nor could they be sustained by the intermittent, low density energy derived from solar cells and wind mills.

7) Satellites, both communication and weather; how many satellites have been launched into space without the use of fire? Many, but not all, are sent to space by hydrocarbon fuels. (Even those satellites that study outgoing long wave radiation and have futilely been attempting to prove that increasing levels of carbon dioxide are causing catastrophic climate change.)

8) One of the consequences of using fire as an energy source is that it has provided many people with enough time on their hands to debate whether or not fire is a good thing, i.e., the global warming AKA climate change AKA biodiversity AKA sustainable development debate.

(Remember also that environmental extremists not only want to ban the use of fire for energy production; they want to ban the use of nuclear energy and hydroelectric energy as well.)

The vast amount of energy that the use of fire has placed at the disposal of humanity has been used to revolutionize the nature of our existence. The mere fact that fire was a source of light and heat independent of the sun meant that humans could roam beyond the tropics into the damp, cold regions of the north with seasons of snow and long freezing nights. It was fire and fire alone that enabled man to become a creature native to the entire world and not just the tropics. In addition, the heat of the fire, i.e. cooking, brought about changes in our food supply that made otherwise inedible food palatable and nourishing. Fire has not only increased the variety of food that humans can eat, it also powers the diesel tractors used in modern farming. Our food supply has consequently multiplied beyond the wildest dreams of our ancient ancestors. Current world hunger problems are primarily distribution problems not quantity problems.

Nor has the importance of fire diminished with time; rather the reverse. Wood was no doubt the first fuel used in building and maintaining a fire, but coal took primacy over wood in the 17th century. In the 20th century these two fuels were join by gasoline and oil. In the 21st century shale oil and natural gas are gaining importance.

If the “powers that be” really thought that the continued use of fire was causing a climate catastrophe they would ban its use all together, but it would seem that they just want a piece of the action. The cap-and-trade scheme is not unlike property tax in which the government just lays claim to your property and starts charging you rent, i.e. property tax. (If you think that you own your home just stop paying your property tax and see what happens.) The cap-and-trade scheme is the government just laying claim on all fossil fuel resource within its jurisdiction and charging people a fee to burn them as an energy source.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” (John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland 17 U.S. 327)

It could be that humans will eventually run out of things to burn, but that day keeps getting pushed back by innovation. For the present I can’t think of a more efficient way to destroy our society’s prosperity, which has brought us all of the above benefits, than to impose a tax on the use of fire. It leaves me wondering; in what kind of society do we now live in which we have to buy a license to use fire as an energy source, something that has been free for 125,000 years? And who exactly are we paying these fees to in order to obtain the privilege of burning that which nature provides?

Carl Brehmer

(Slightly edited from the original.)

“Germany and the European Union have taken a pioneering role on climate protection, under the mistaken assumption that other countries would follow our example. That’s the wrong strategy. Making this kind of advanced effort weakens our bargaining position. Instead of building wind turbines, we should build higher dikes.”

– German government advisor Kai Konrad

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-kai-konrad-on-the-mistakes-of-european-climate-policy-a-870693.html