Posted 17 minutes ago

Anti-pulp mill campaigner and Sydney businessman Geoffrey Cousins is hoping Australia's major banks refuse to fund Gunns' proposed northern Tasmanian project.

Climate capers...
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Row erupts over risk to polar bears

One of the most controversial voices in the global warming debate believes too much emphasis is put on extinction fears for ecology's poster animals

* Juliette Jowit
* The Observer
* Sunday October 14 2007

The global warming sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, has sparked fresh debate about the dangers of increasing temperatures with new claims that polar bears are not on the brink of collapse and are more threatened by hunting than by climate change.

In a new book called Cool It, Lomborg says many of the predicted effects of climate change - from melting icecaps to drought and flood - are 'vastly exaggerated and emotional claims that are simply not founded in data'.
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Last night Lomborg was accused of the same misuse of statistics which he levels at other scientists, environmental groups and the media.
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...l. But for many scientists it is not a question of either reducing greenhouse gases or adapting to climate change, but doing both, said Asher Minns of the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. 'The idea of adaptation to climate change is very old and there's as much work around adaptation as there is around mitigating greenhouse gases and coming up with low carbon technologies.'

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And:
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ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

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Gus: The certainty of uncertainty in climate change
In sciences that involve many sources of data — mostly incomplete data, there will always be some dispute about the why and therefore of things. But there are some certainty amongst the variables.
* The earth is warming — faster than even predicted by models of global warming.
* Since the late 19th century, the relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and warming has been studied extensively and a relationship has long been proposed.
* From the beginning of the industrial revolution, a trend of warming has been observed, while many scientists till the early 1940s were predicting a cooling (an incoming ice age) according to past patterns of climate imprinted in the records of many geoscientific disciplines,
* Precise scientific studies of CO2 in the atmosphere shows a sharp rise of this gas concentration.
* Expected parallel between warming and CO2 concentration are being observed.
* up to 90 per cent of CO2 presently in the atmosphere could be related to human activity. From burning fossil fuels to cattle herding to deforestation.
* Climatology is a science based on probabilities and incomplete data. Climatology defines trends in climatic patterns and possible development. Unlike certain sciences like physics in which to a great extend, actions will create a precise reaction in an ideal situation, the elasticity of air masses, the variability of temperature, pressure, humidity, dew point, altitude of air currents at any one time around the globe is impossible to map precisely. A small event can change the whole process, but trends will still persist despite apparent confusion.
* Strong trends can emerge from studying as many points as possible and a statistical chart can be built with "acceptable" margins of errors, which even at its most conservative acceptance show an upward trend to warming...
* What most climate change sceptics challenge are the margins of error, the interpretation of data, the methodologies, the cost of being wrong should climate change be a furphy in relation to human activity...
* There no certainty in the climate change theory, except a noticeable and explainable strong trend.
* The greater certainty is that should we release more CO2 and other "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere, is that temperatures will rise even more.
* Some scientific experiments have led many scientists to believe that concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere can be critical above a certain amount, leading to even greater rise in temperature than the 2 degrees presently predicted for 2100.
* For a few years now I have observed many "natural" phenomenon variations, including:
— some plants lately flowering according to daily climate variability while before they flowered according to "seasons".
— ants lately being attracted to water, actually "drinking", while at most time ants resent water.
— small changes in local climatic patterns, over the last 35 years, that indicate a trend towards warming.

For many years, I have also been informed by credible scientists of the "carbon equation". the relationship between past climatic conditions and the carbon contents between plants, animals and atmosphere. Always in a flux, interfering with some species survival and promoting others and in some instances having devastating effects. All of this inscribed in the geological record of plant and animal life. Some strong external events have also been crucial in changes on planet earth including "bolides" (big meteor and comets hitting the earth). We are still at the mercy of those. A big one has hit the earth as recently as the beginning of the 20th century but relatively small enough not to make global damage like the one at the end of the Jurassic period that is thought to have started the decline of the Dinosaurs... I keep repeating myself here, but it is important to note that Dinosaurs took about one million years to become extinct after that event. Important changes on a geological time scales can take millions of years.

The climatic change that faces us now appears to be super fast, under the "normal" terms of geological change. Thus we are like rabbits or kangaroos caught up in the lights of an oncoming car. We do not know which speed the car is doing, we do not know which side of the road to jump to. We can spend a lot of time studying all the apparent parameters but we do not know the intent of the driver. All we know is that if we do not something, either the car will stop or we will be hit for six. At the moment, it looks the car is accelerating...

I am firmly with Al Gore.

In relation to Polar Bears, a study of the extinction of the mammoths can draw an interesting conclusion. It has been widely acknowledge that several factors were at play in the extinction of these animals — with a strange discovery that these animals survived at least another 5,000 years than previously thought in isolation on an island. The surviving animals cut off from the mainland by rising seas, became "stunted" that is they became smaller as they bred, possibly due to the scarcity of food.

But what most scientists attribute the disappearance of the mammoths, is a combination of factors: Global warming stressing their metabolism, also inducing a change in vegetation, a reduction of habitats and hunting by a mammal called homo sapiens. It is important to note here is that Homo sapiens did not reach that particular island for an extra 5,000 years and that the mammoths on this island then became extinct.

Nothing new to our present situation in which we hunt other species to the door of extinction, reduce their habitats and on top of which we can add vicious poisoning of the earth with insecticides, herbicides and other man made chemicals...

The earth of evolving nature is becoming the earth of the humans. Soon to be the planet of the apes. But we are destroying these animals habitat, possible because their genetic and mirror image of ourselves is too close for comfort.

The earth soon to be the planet of the cockroaches?