ausculture.com

Yes, well despite their obvious journalistic inexperience, *chortle* The Sydney Morning Herald and journo and 350.org founder Bill McKibben have had their words put alongside mine in a post at Peak Energy. (You could almost call this a trend, ausculture having so recently been picked up by TV Tonight. Then again, I might post nothing more than lame 7 News screen-grabs for the next 6 months!)

Gav at Peak Energy does a great job of pulling together interesting pieces from all over the web, including science and technology sites and those focussed on energy sustainability for the future. The site’s name is based around the concept of ‘peak oil’ – the point at which oil production goes into decline, which has apparently already been reached in the US, the third largest oil producer. Unfortunately, there are still vast amounts of coal underground. And because Australia doesn’t value add enough, we’re as touchy as a developing world country about the idea of leaving ours there.

The arguments from the ‘deniosaurs’ are inane and spurious – a crock. The likes of Andrew Bolt spew them out endlessly, and many Australians seize on them triumphantly, comforting themselves like a five-year-old who’s been told their dead bunny is going to pet heaven. If the consequences of inaction weren’t so serious, it’d be almost funny. Like those who say 350 ppm CO2 represents 0.000035% and is inconsequential. This is both out by several decimal places and just plain ridiculous. Plant and animal life on this planet actually depends on a moderate greenhouse effect, and this is extremely well understood to be caused by the water vapour, CO2, methane and other gasses in the atmosphere. Without a natural greenhouse effect, the world would be about 33°C colder – a very large snowball!

Bolt shoots his bolt

In May this year, Andrew Bolt posted a rant entitled ‘World still cooling’ on his News Ltd blog. Now if you’ve read my article on fluctuations in solar output, you’ll know there are many factors that affect Earth’s median temperature – like varying solar output – and even if that claim were true it would be merely a restbite. But what was interesting – well, horrifying – was the way he totally misrepresented the scientific data.

The Alfred Wegener Institute had posted a press release on a recent data-gathering flight over the arctic. This was not an announcement of results, as can easily be told by the title – ‘Research aircraft Polar 5 finishes Arctic expedition – Unique measurement flights in the central Arctic completed’. It made a passing reference to ice measurements: “Multiple flights northwards from various stations showed an ice thickness between 2.5 (two years old ice in the vicinity of the North Pole) and 4 metres (perennial ice in Canadian offshore regions).” Somehow, the Canada Free Press managed to morph this into ‘North Pole Sea Ice twice as thick as expected’, which wasn’t what they were saying at all. In fact, the 2.5m at the north pole was only just thick enough to land on. Bolt had seized on a headline that supported his bizarre viewpoint that the icecaps are in great shape and run with it without checking back to the source document. That’s bad journalism. It’s appalling journalism.

Six weeks later, the Institute released a second press release – ‘New record Arctic sea ice cover minimum? Climate researchers from Bremerhaven and Hamburg present new prognoses.’ Quote: “We have computed in this year’s first prognosis that the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean will lie at the end of the summer with at least 28 % probability under that of 2007 – the year with the lowest-ever measured ice extension.” Something tells me you will never hear mention of that in any Bolt blog or column. Buyer beware!

Image: solness.com.au for 350.org