Agmates

AS I’ve always said - Tim Flannery is a top notch climate change bloke.

One other reminder Steve, since you are in to changing opinions today

Well the CSIRO or AGO has a carbon accounting model that determines the carbon impacts of activity across Australia, which obviously you would hold in very little regard given the lack of credit it gives for biosequestration etc etc.

The trouble is is puts sceptics in a conundrum… because that is the software written by sceptic poster Boy Dr David Evans… Rocket Science extrordinaire…

Hang on - he is also the guy who wrote that same program that let John Howard claim to be meeting Kyoto targets simply by stopping Queensland farmers from clearing land… which as you put it means out entire Kyoto achievements have been paid for by farmers!!!

Hmmmm….

Matt

MattB,

Your statement:
“The trouble is is puts sceptics in a conundrum… because that is the software written by sceptic poster Boy Dr David Evans… Rocket Science extraordinare…”
is a bit misleading, - conundrum?

- from his article on Lavoisier “Show us the Evidence Penny Wong”, he states 6 years with the AGO, and then as evidence became more convincing that MMCC wasn’t as the IPCC was stating, he then left. ie. he changed his mind. Have you watched the video?

I feel the ‘Rocket Scientist’ tag was just flippancy, or a touch of sarcasm. Probably exasperation from his peers saying ‘we must keep up solidarity on this, or we’ll lose our funding’

Scenario:
Imagine the Australian Greenhouse Office’s dilemma if Climate Change was found to be caused by the sun. Nah, I don’t think you could.

Have you checked with Spaceweather.com lately? We are now at a sunspot low that hasn’t occurred since 1913.

Completely Off Topic,

Well I suppose they may have Professor “Sulphur” Tim Flannery in the audience. -
but I thought Agmates would like to know about the visit by and award to Dr Rajendra Pachauri of the UN: of vegetarian fame.

Wonder if they’re serving vegeburgers afterwards?

I’d imagine the champagne corks would pop and everyone would break out in a spontaneous 10 day drinking binge celebration at the AGO if it was shown that CO2 was not a problem and it was all the sun. Seriously!

My point is that if CO2 biosequestration is not accounted for properly for agriculture, then the blame seems to lie directly with the FullCam program (I think that is the name) written by Dr Evans. The impact that CO2 has on warming is independent of the model by David Evans as far as I am aware.

It seems all he did was write a program that let John Howard (Sceptic and effectvely Evan’s boss for 10 years) blame it all on QLD land clearing. Is that science or political expediency.

Personally I doubt that Evans ever believed in AGW… but it certainly makes a better story…

MattB,

I doubt that scenario very much, all those departments, all those well funded jobs. What does a ‘used to be climate change expert’ do? Probably couldn’t even get a job as a weather forecaster.(LOL)

As far as FullCAM, you can read the User Manual here:

A 52 page pdf, credited to Garry Richards, David Evans and Jim Leitch.

Doesn’t look like a political statement to me, didn’t see ex PM John Howard’s instructions in there to use it to blame it all on Qld land clearing. Of course what the DECC did with it after is conjecture, or is it?

David Evans wouldn’t be any different to any other learned programmer/coder, given a criteria and a job to do, you just do it. Whether you believe in the criteria is irrelevant.

I could understand that having gone through the concept in great detail, as would be required in programming it, he could come to the conclusion of “This is all B/S!!”, get it done and get out.

You are certainly correct in one regard Jeff… David Evans is no different to any other programmer/coder… he knows jack about climate science…

Just listened to the interview with Prof. Tim Flannery.

Besides the usual pushing of the Climate Change barrow a la IPCC, CSIRO and how Ross Garnaut is right, there wasn’t a lot in it.

The mention of the Mataranka property were holistic management is employed was important, the visual from “Two in the Top End” with Tim Flannery and John Doyle said it all, it works, very impressive.

Flannery sidesteps the existence of the Greenland occupation by Norsemen during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), but there exists the remains of stone buildings there from the period.

Acknowledgment of this MWP would fly in the face of the discredited MBH98 hockeystick graph as used by the IPCC up until AR4 WG1 report. (the bump that was edited out by Mann et al)

He also sidestepped the caller about 35 year old timber, after stating that as trees grow they sequester carbon, but after maturity they can also emit CO2. At that point, should you not harvest the timber for building use (store the carbon) and regrow new timber?

Oh well we can look forward to some more “good government regulation.”

Well MattB,

That was a marvelous and biased conclusion.

If David Evans was a robotics programmer, or a financial or economics statistics programmer, he probably wouldn’t have got the position in the AGO/DECC.

Evan’s expertise is in mathematics and computing, does research into mathematics in the field of Fourier analysis. This would make him eminently suitable to analyze scenario’s such as the missing CO2 heating signature in the upper atmosphere.

The more I look into Professor Tim Flannery the less I am impressed.

From the radio interview, Flannery’s introduction included his Chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council. Others included on this council include James Lovelock.

Lovelock is best known as the inventor of the Gaia thesis, which views the Earth as a whole living being.

He has also authored five books on this theme.

Flannery has repeatedly shown that like Garnaut and almost all Australian academics who claim to be climate scientists, he cannot distinguish between gross and net effects.

This is most apparent in the absurd Garnaut proposal that we need to switch from beef to Roos for most of our barbies, on the sole grounds that cattle are not “carbon neutral”.

In fact as I have shown in more detail here already (see thread “Eat Skippy to save the planet”), cattle cannot emit more than they have eaten in the form of either CO2 (see FAO 2007) or methane (CH4, see Keppler et al, Nature, Jan 2006).

Keppler’s paper shows how grass etc contain much more CH4 than livestock emit. The inconvenient truth is that what they emit was already present in what they ate.

Oh dear MattB,

Off the rails again. The grass produces methane as a result of the photosynthesis process; cattle eat that grass including its existing CH4; they may themselves convert some of the carbon element into additional CH4, but the overall package is that cattle etc eat grass containing C and CH4, convert it into energy, and exhale (at both ends!) both CO2 and CH4.

The total respiration and farting cannot exceed what was absorbed in the first place. Re so-called fossil fuels (coal), they were formed by absorption of atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis a long time ago, and when burnt return that CO2 to the atmosphere.

The case of oil is different, it is not a fossil fuel (did you ever spot any fossils as you filled your Hummer?) but emanates from the inner earth as a result of chemical processes (not photosynthesis) discovered and proved by Thomas Gold of Cornell. Even so it is a hydrocarbon, so burning it merely recycles what was used to produce it in the first place, however long ago.

The whole problem you have along with Garnaut and the the IPCC is inability to recognise the holistic processes that have produced and sustain our plant. Thus the former AGO now Penny Wong’s Det of Climate Change in its carbon accounting assumes that emissions emerge without initial absorption.

It is that kind of accounting which has produced the banking crisis, as hedge funds booked only income and overlooked their cost of funds. Back to Business School, Matt, but be careful which one you choose (I suggest Wharton as Harvard never did understand basic bookkeeping)!

BTW, if you ever run into your mate James Haughton do ask him when he is going to apologise for his libelous allegations (that I am a hired hack of the PNG logging industry). I would hate to have to send for my lawyer.

Matt - if you rely on appeals to Authority, there’s no hope.

Address the issue I raised, that emissions would be nil without inputs, whether from fuel (filling your tank) or from livestock (no feed, no farts or burps).

Why cannot the finest living climate scientists see this, eg Brook in his Sub with Singer and Russell to Garnaut? Brook aims to enlighten us but refuses to answer the simplest question, eg from the opening of his blog, HOW MUCH carbon H2O and CH4 do livestock ingest over their lives, and HOW MUCH do they respire etc over their lifetime and at death?

He is the one in line for the Nobel, but not before he digests Keppler and the FAO on this issue.

Matt, good to see some progress at last, BUT:

you said “Tim, I don’t think that anyone doubts that if nothing goes in then nothing comes out.” But you still seem to think, more comes out than went in or have I misunderstood you?

You added:
“You seem to think that what goes in must = what goes out… trouble is no-one seems to agree with you.”

Well that’s what I was taught, and have had confirmed by a lead author of TAR here at ANU (I gather he’s in line for a Nobel, he’s often cited in AR4). That FAO Report (“Livstock’s Long Shadow”) found that livestock is actually a net sink, simply because of its growing numbers (as are we humans, when our population was static, we were neutral, when it fell we were a source, as we are still increasing in number we are a sink, i.e. embody more carbon in aggregate at 6.5 billion than we did at 3 billion; when we die it all goes to dust or ashes as you know, but with births still outweighing deaths, the net is positive). (The Fao report is available online; see section 3.2.2, which states: “respiration by livestock is not a source of CO2″, and makes the point of a growing total herd being a sink.

Unfortunately the FAO had not read Keppler - now there’s somebody in line for a Nobel, if he’s not shot by Brook or Singer first - so the FAO got the methane wrong).

Finally you said: “Why don’t you do all Aussie farmers a favour and damn well publish this obvious science that will save them millions if not billions of ETS related emission costs”.

See you at the Lakeside Rydges here in Canberra this weekend, where my forthcoming joint paper on effect of atmospheric CO2 on wheat yields gets its first airing (it’s slated for publication next year, as also my critique of Garnaut).

Different comes out Tim, different… you know some sceptics at least come up with arguments that at least appear they may be grounded in reality.

Also will be interesting to see what your paper on wheat yields has to do with CH4 emissions from cows… given that is what we are discussing.

I also don’t see how demonstrating that plants turn CO2 in to solid stuff, which we eat (and cows do too) which stays solid - has to do with CH4 emissions from cows…

It just seems a very strange angle of attack Tim…

Maybe I just misjudge you - maybe I allow my fair critique to be tainted by the fact I’ve never encountered you on a blog where in fact you have not been arguing totally random suggestions against established scientific experts, and where you have not been comprehensively sent packing in everyone’s eyes but your own.

But yeah I’m sure your groundbreaking published document will send shockwaves and if it does I’ll be the 1st to put my hand up as a doubter proved wrong…

Hi Matt:

I was referring to your gibe about me helping farmers; I think the Garnaut programme to reduce atmospheric CO2 will concern wheat farmers as much as his ETS will also concern all farmers.

I append 2 quotes from Keppler, which explain better than I have what he has found. The point is that livestock by eating grass etc prevent the very substantial emissions of CH4 that would otherwise occur.

So this issue is, how much CH4 emissions do they save by eating relative to what they later emit. The CH4 is so to speak embodied in the grass, and the constituents in the grass giving rise to the emissions from grass are obviously still present when in ruminants’ guts. Anyway, I give up on you, here is Keppler:
#1: “Here we demonstrate using stable carbon isotopes that methane is readily formed in situ in terrestrial plants under oxic conditions by a hitherto unrecognized process.

We suggest that this newly identified source may have important implications for the global methane budget and may call for a reconsideration of the role of natural methane sources in past climate change.”

#2 “CH4 released by living vegetation is calculated to be in the range 62–236 Tg yr21 (average 149 Tg yr-1) with the main contribution, 46–169 Tg y-1 (average 107 Tg y-1), assigned to tropical forests and grasslands (Table 1).

The detection of an additional source of this magnitude, some 10–30% of the present annual source strength, would necessitate reconsideration of the global CH4 budget”.

Over to you! How come the IPCC missed this strengthening of their doom and gloom? Roos don’t help, cattle do, being a net sink.

As you would be aware there is significant debate about Keppler’s work… But I still don’t see anything there about cows?

MattB,

A quick referral to that “Hot Spot” diagram, from the IPCC AR4 through “Hawaiian Reporter”, article featuring Christopher Monckton.

Disregard the carrier or the messenger, I found it more convenient than looking for a link to a page in the middle of a very large IPCC document.

Please note the diagrams to do with said “Hot Spot”.

David Evan’s analysis was a critique of that fact. Mathematicians can analyse data, just look at McKitrick and Michaels analysis of the Mann et al, MBH98 hockeystick.

The CERN link was to do with your response about Svensmark. However you also say the solar effects are taken into account by AR4, but you didn’t qualify that with it is only direct radiative forcing. Cloud cover and externals like cosmic rays aren’t countered as relevant.

Matt:

So you are back to your original view that ruminants (including cows) do not first absorb and then emit.

Keppler does not mention livestock but it’s a logical inference that if grass is eaten before it emits CH4, then the eaters should be credited with that. Too bad this is beyond you, the AGO/DCC, Brook, and Singer.

No Tim not at all. NIce try though…

It was only last week on Agmates that I was told that cows accelerate the grass growth - “just like mowing your lawn”…

So you would need to compare the CH4 emissions from an ungrazed pasture/whatever to the emissions from the vegetation when grazed by ruminant livestock.

If as suggested cows increase grass growth, you may well find that the CH4 emissions from the vegetation occur whether grazed or not… so EVEN IF you could PROVE that all the CH4 emitted by cows belching was in fact just the CH4 that the pasture would have eaten anyway, well you would still have to look at the CH4 emissions from the pasture themselves…

as you essentially have a constant “regrowth” pasture when grazed, rather than a longer grassed more mature pasture… and well I don’t know the answer to that and I doubt that you do either.

I still don’t see ANY logic to the argument that the amount of CH4 emitted by a cow would be equal to the ingested CH4… the CH4 from cows is produced by bacteria in the digestion process… and I’m not sure that the CH4 in the grass would actually be absorbed by the cow as a food source… or is the CH4 not actually in the grass, but it is a CH4 potential of the grass you are talking about?? not as though the CH4 is sitting in little sub-surface bubbles?

I did read this from Kepplers own mouth though

“The most frequent misinterpretation we find in the media is that emissions of methane from plants are responsible for global warming. As those emissions from plants are a natural source, they have existed long before man’s influence started to impact upon the composition of the atmosphere.

Even if land use practices have altered plant methane emissions, which we did not demonstrate, this would also count as an anthropogenic source, and the plants themselves cannot be deemed responsible.”

So you seem to be drawing conclusions the the author does not.