News from around the planet:
European carbon market plummets. The price of EU carbon emission allowances has dropped with the falling price of oil, Nature News reports, with allowances to emit one extra tonne of CO2 selling at €11.65 (AUD$22.90) on carbon trading exchanges.
Reef fish numbers sink. A growing taste for live reef fish in Southeast Asia has sent their numbers sinking, with a report finding that numbers of reef fish in the “Coral Triangle“, has declined by 79% over the last five to 20 years.
Antarctica heats up. A study has found that Antarctica has gotten warmer overall since the 1950s, even though certain parts of the continent have cooled due to the ozone hole. Says scientist Eric Steig:
“The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling and that’s not the case. If anything it’s the reverse, but it’s more complex than that. Antarctica isn’t warming at the same rate everywhere, and while some areas have been cooling for a long time the evidence shows the continent as a whole is getting warmer.”
Bamboo bicycles. If you feel like replacing your car with a bike doesn’t lower your carbon footprint enough, check out these bikes made from bamboo. The makers are also working in the developing world to help local entrepreneurs to make and sell their own.
One Comment
I have an uneasy feeling, having read both the linked coverage, and other stories written about this report, that it has been contrived to create the impression that an anomaly in the world wide warming trend has been eliminated for reasons of ideology rather than science.
Both the msnbc and BBC reports are full of caveats arguing against the conclusions the paper’s authors draw, and which are also contradicted by the long term on the ground records taken on the main Antarctic continent as distinct from the rather more temperate conditions of the Palmer Peninsula.
And one of the reports finally points out the blindingly obvious, that ice shelves do break off. They are extrusions of glacial ice. If they didn’t break off they’d eventually reach Tasmania.
Is it really necessary to contort every piece of data to fit the perceptions and agendas of climate change? Climate change, and the serious human inputs are real enough, without any help from those who set out to ‘find’ data to fill in the blanks and somehow invalidate the real historic ground level observations on the larger part of the ice continent.
This reminds me of the disgraceful attempt made several years ago to blame a rabbit plague and widespread erosion on Macquarie Island on global warming, when in fact, it was an act of idiocy in the Australian administration of the island in which the feral cats, which had been keeping the rabbits in equilibrium, were killed without dealing with the rabbits simultaneously. That act of barbarous and ignorant vandalism has destroyed much of the world heritage area. It had nothing to do with global warming.
Let’s get on with fixing industrially forced global warming, and ease off on manufactured fairy tales.