Articles Tagged "Stewart Franks"

Where does government derive its advice from about climate change?

The Australian government appears to take advice on global warming and climate change from a wide and healthy range of sources.

These sources include the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), the CSIRO, the Department of Climate Change (DOCC, which incorporates the former federal Australian Greenhouse Office), the Climate Commission (CC) and the United Nations’ Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Advice is also fed into the national climate debate from a range of similar state-based bodies. For example, in Queensland alone there is a state Department of Climate Change, a Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) at Griffith University.

Finally, climate policies are also urged on the government by spokespeople for many university climate-related research groups, business lobby groups and consultants, and by large environmental lobby organizations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Climate Institute.

Given such a wide and diverse range of sources, one might conclude that the government must surely be getting sound advice, but in fact that would be a very wrong inference.

Government misadvised on global warming

On November 10 last year, the government’s Multi-party Climate Change Committee (MCCC) received a summary of the state of global warming science from its sole scientist member, ANU’s Professor Will Steffen. (see Powerpoint presentation here…).

All policy discussion conducted within the committee since has been predicated upon the accuracy of Professor Steffen’s advice, which was that a high risk of human-related dangerous warming exists and that urgent steps need to be taken to curtail carbon dioxide emissions.

In a more recent speech last week, Climate Minister Combet indicated his continuing reliance upon the views of Professor Steffen, who had advised him that:

there is 100% certainty that the earth is warming, and that there is a very high level of certainty it will continue to warm unless efforts are made to reduce the levels of carbon pollution being sent into the atmosphere.

QUEENSLANDERS should brace themselves for more cyclones, flooding and wild weather over coming months as a strong La Nina pattern settles in over the eastern states.

And weather experts predict the climate chaos could last even longer, with some forecasting the current cycle could remain in place for up to 30 years.

Stewart Franks, environmental engineer and scientist at the University of Newcastle, told The Australian yesterday that the category 5 Cyclone Yasi and recent major floods in Queensland were direct results of joint La Nina and Cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation weather patterns.

No one died in yesterday's cyclone despite the storm being larger than the devastating Hurricane Katrina.

However, more than 30 people lost their lives in the southern Queensland floods.

La Nina patterns are usually associated with above-normal rainfall across much of Queensland and enhanced tropical cyclone activity in the Coral Sea.

DESPITE increased understanding of a number of different climate processes and their impact on a range of different timescales, this knowledge is not being used to inform planning and decision making. This is because long-term climate risk is often viewed only in statistical terms.

For instance, engineering techniques for estimating flood risk, where records exist, are largely based on simple statistics of their historic occurrence rather than on any real understanding of the processes that actually cause them.

In essence, if we have 100 years of flood record, then the largest flood measured represents, more or less, the hundred year flood level. This hundred year flood level is probably the most important of hydrological statistics in terms of its use in planning management. It is the yardstick by which decisions are made.

The problem with a simple statistical representation of risk is that it implies a static climate – the expected flood risk is equally likely in any year, irrespective of the actual climate processes that may or may not be dominating at that particular time. If this were the case, we would expect to see an equal spread of floods throughout our historical records. In Australia and in fact many other parts of the world, this is not so.

Updated below with three papers by Stewart Franks

THE big wet may not be over for Queenslanders for another few decades, with the La Nina climate pattern tipped to be a repeat visitor.

Stewart Franks, associate professor in environmental engineering at NSW's University of Newcastle, said his research suggested "enhanced" La Ninas would dominate eastern Australian summer weather patterns for years to come.

"What we noticed is El Nino and La Nina events are actually not random, they tend to cluster, and they cluster on time frames between 10 to 40 years," he said.

Professor Franks, an Australian national representative to the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, said the last run of strong La Ninas occurred between the mid-1940s and mid-1970s, culminating in the 1974 floods.

A. Preamble

Emissions trading legislation, such as the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (CPRS) bill that is currently before parliament, rests upon the assumption that human greenhouse emissions, especially carbon dioxide, (i) are pollutants, and (ii) are causing dangerous global warming. Neither of these assumptions is supported by empirical evidence, and both have been under scientific challenge for many years by a large body of qualified and independent scientists.

Cognisant of these facts, Senator Steve Fielding has posed three direct questions to the Minister for Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong, in order to clarify whether or not evidence exists that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming, as alleged by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Minister’s replies to the Fielding questions drew heavily on IPCC arguments and advice. Parliament, in preparing to implement policy based upon the advice of an international political agency, has not hitherto had available to it a due diligence scientific assessment of the adequacy of the IPCC recommendations (Professor Garnaut’s extensive report being an economic and not a scientific analysis). As independent scientists, and at the request of Senator Fielding, we provide preliminary scientific due diligence in this document.