The Parsons Report

PHILL PARSONS
Hotter than a nuclear reactor, more powerful than a speeding asteroid, climate models underestimate degree of warming. Or how Fielding got it wrong and killed his God
There is also more on the world’s most carbon dense Tasmanian forests, a richness the government deliberately fails to understand, protect and benefit from on behalf of us all.

Among all the Gore and Rudd, Garrett hanging his moral values and Fielding playing denier politics in a desperate struggle for Family First by risking the idea of any family surviving, we have a study that show the climate models we are using now underestimate the degree of warming during a previous event by half.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090714124956.htm

Fielding asks where is the warming associated with the volume of CO2, as though this is some simple linear system that a middle grade engineer might design and another understand.

Hey Steve, this is a complex with all sorts of loops to address changes. Read Lovelock on GAIA theory and you will get some idea of the complexity and behaviour of the planet in regulating its climate.

Where does the energy go that should be heating the atmosphere according to Steve. Oceans warm and expand, ice on the land and sea melts. Is he not impressed by an actual rise in atmospheric temperature in that volume of gas, that’s a lot of Bunsen burners Steve.

What does the Victorian Water Minister instruction to the desal plant operator and the pipeline from the Goulburn River valley operator mean?. He has instructed both to run at full capacity until Melbourne’s water storages are at 65% of storage capacity.

It is likely that the commissioning of both desal plant and pipeline will be just in time to prevent Melbourne being a very dry city. Given the outlook for rain, water restrictions are likely to remain in force, if not go up several levels, as the below 27% storages empty out further.

Who would invest in a dry city?

The desal plant at a cost of over $3B to its private developers will want to see a return, not sit idly by making little return on the investment. Like the privatized dirty brown coal power industry, which will provide the energy to run the plant, they are economic fixtures not to be trifled with.

What a disaster it will be if Melbourne has a south east Queensland event and the dams fill from runoff.

In Queensland it made the water grid and the recycling plant investments somewhat redundant in Premier Bligh’s first full electoral cycle. All that treasure tied up being idle. The reward for the punters who are going without other government investment or are paying the investments off, no water restrictions.

This now redundant investment is a cost brought on by climate instability.

Further, the brown coal plants will continue to exacerbate the dryness of south-eastern Australia, through the particulate emissions and the greenhouse gases. There is no point arresting one source of climate impact through carbon sequestration unless the coal is gasified and gas turbine introduced reducing the particulates emitted and thus the impacts on rainfall in the particulate plume.

Such a change in the fuel even has the benefit of reducing the volume of CO2 to be captured after burning.

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/water-issues/desal-plant-to-run-until-dams-reach-65-20090710-dg3y.html

Victorian wil,l like Queenslanders, continue to bear the environmental, social and economic costs of a high carbon economy. Even if the desal plant and pipeline solve the problem for the metro area much of country Victoria will continue to have problems.

Until all jurisdictions realize they need to take climate instability seriously, set goals to rapidly decarbonize using currently available technologies until better ones develop the treasure that could go to addressing health and education will be drawn into stop gap measures making the changes necessary less likely given the limitations of budgets.

Indeed Carbon budgets have again made it into the news with the study that identified mountain ash eucalypt forests as the densest carbon stores on the planet associated with a study comparing forests across the world.

On top of the density prize remaining with those still threatened forests of Victoria and Tasmania the comparison with the ruling data the upon which the decisions about which forests to protect as carbon sinks is made is shown up as false.

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0717-forest_carbon.html

It’s published now woodworker and so it must be knocked down by a scientific study not somebody regurgitating FT propaganda.

Further, it becomes interesting that the Obama administration has changed its old growth logging plans for Oregon, partly in recognition of the carbon density of these forests along with the fact that the Bush administration cooked the books regarding the spotted owl habitat and the threat to it.

http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=133054

Some Oregon forests are as carbon dense as some Tasmanian forests above ground [tC/ha].

But its worse for woodworker’s ilk

Other Tasmanian forests are more carbon dense than all other forests studied.

Its time the Bartlett government moved from fantasyland to the real world.

Taking the Denison team out for a stroll Bartlett this week bagged the Greens for their economic credentials.

Bartlett continues to bind Tasmania tightly to the past when he should be keeping up and seeking a sustainable future. All talk and little action will not place Tasmanian anywhere near the position it needs to be in as the world either rapidly decarbonizes.

Avoiding decarbonization is no longer an option. We may start early and keep costs down or we may delay and suffer higher costs of more rapid transition and the additional damage that early action would avoid. Tasmanian will not be magically immune.

Its export focused economy is vulnerable, its coast are vulnerable, its vulnerable to drought and the subsequent fires. The people inhabiting its poor housing stock may benefit from increased temperatures but those temperatures will make other things less comfortable as the yields crops we grow are affected by changing temperatures.

Which party was it that floated and promoted the idea of wind power, which was it that created the image of clean and green so abused by this government, which party made so much of the benefits to the economy of a tourists industry.

Labor, bereft of new ideas took these up and adopted others under pressure. Stymied, run dead, short changed and still they have come through as defining Tasmania, as being a major pert of its economy and even a contributor to local manufacturing and energy production.

Bartlett may, by repeating the mantra about the economy continue to create a doubt among some voters about the Greens capacity to manage the economy in coalition with any other party following the 2010 election.

However, there is no actual evidence that a government containing Green Ministers or in coalition or supporting another party will cause the economy to fail, falter or shrink when it is not the governing party.

Any failure from the era of the Field or Rundle governments lies at the feet of those governments. The Greens were not in power and the decisions that sent those governments back to the people were their own.

Bartlett knows that there will be difficulties for Tasmanian labor if it has to govern with Green support. It is the greater scrutiny, the need to explain and prove the benefits of changes that minority government does not like. It has to work to prove its case and it is not as easy to keep its supporters in the party and in business happy with the specials it is capable of offering when a majority.

Recognizing and making an economic benefit of the carbon density of Tasmania’s forests is one such thing that will come into focus more clearly with a minority government.

Provided that the pollution from and the landscaping of the natural gas liqification plant at Westbury are best practice its construction can only be a benefit as it replace diesel as a heavy transport fuel. The consortium involved are to be congratulated for their foresight.

phill Parsons