Researchers not associated with the study, published online Wednesday in The Lancet, found the results compelling and disturbing. Companies are actively developing and testing drugs that raise HDL, although three recent studies of such treatments have failed.
Professor Matthew England, co-director of University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, is reluctant to explicitly apportion any of the flood crisis to climate change. But he stressed that “to exclude climate change would be premature”.
Earlier this week, he told Reuters news agency: “I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change. The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon.”
Professor England explained to me the waters to the north of Australia have warmed by about 0.5C over the last 50 years. Those waters are currently about 1.5C warmer than average, he said, so it’s likely that about a third of this warming is due to long-term ocean temperature increases, the remainder due to the normal La Nina cycle.(For anyone doubting the extent of the floods that came, and the high sea temperatures around Northern Australia that preceded it, you should have a look through the slides the BOM used at the flood enquiry earlier this year.)
A Sydney researcher, Jason Evans, ran a series of climate models and found above average sea surface temperatures throughout December 2010 increased the amount of rainfall across the state by 25 per cent on average....Now, the study does not actually look at what caused the high temperatures, and as such you can't really call it an attribution study relating specifically to the role of AGW. (I suppose it's like the first half an attribution study - first look at whether warmer waters did contribute to increased flooding, then look at how the water got warmer.) Still, surely it's reasonable to strongly suspect, seeing the gradual rise in the relevant sea surface temperatures over the last 30 years, that AGW might just have something to do with it. From the university press release:
Between December 23 and 28 many places experienced up to 400 millimetres of rain in a few days. "That [means] 100 millimetres of rain was attributable to sea surface temperatures," said Dr Evans, a future fellow at the University of NSW's Climate Change Research Centre.
While the flooding occurred during one of the strongest La Nina events on record it was insufficient to produce the extreme rainfall recorded, he said.
The effect of the high sea surface temperatures coupled with the impact of a La Nina, both of which are associated with above average rainfall over eastern Australia, plus tropical cyclone Tasha, combined to create an extreme weather event, he said.
The resulting floods stretched across 1.3 million square kilometres all the way to Brisbane, caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 35 people.
And this:
Sea-surface temperatures off northern Australia in the Indian Ocean, Arafura Sea and Coral Sea were unusually warm at the time, in places as much as 2 degrees C, the study notes: analysing 30 years of historic measurements, the study identified a general warming trend there of at least 0.2 degrees C per decade.A few posts back, I noted that some studies indicate a substantial warming of nearly 3 degrees in parts of the Pacific by the end of the Century.
“If the observed warming trend in the sea-surface temperatures continues, this result suggests that future La Niña events are more likely to produce extreme precipitation and flooding than is present in the historical record,” says Dr Jason Evans, of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre. Dr Evans led the study, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, with a French co-author, Dr Irène Boyer-Souchet.
"abnormally high ocean temperatures" may have simply been natural variability at work. But according to England, climate change "could not be excluded". Similarly, therefore, we cannot exclude the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was behind it, sneakily raising sea temperatures with his noodly appendage…It's a really pathetic and lame attempt to turn around (what I would say) is an overly cautious choice of words into an attempted bit of logical ridicule.
Brooke Anderson-White, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in pathology, has received a grant from the Knights Templar Eye Foundation Inc. for research to develop vitally needed new treatments for severe eye infections caused by the Toxoplasma gondii parasite.
The parasite infects as many as a billion people worldwide, many of whom have no symptoms. However, it can cause severe problems in those with weakened immune systems or in infants infected during pregnancy, leading to the condition toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis. Infected children can develop severe vision impairment and blindness as a result of retinal scarring caused by the disease. Toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis is a major source of visual impairment in the United States.
The researchers from the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA), spent many weeks examining the hidden pornographic video* found on suspected Al Qaeda member, the Austrian Maqsood Lodin, when he was arrested in Berlin after returning from Pakistan. The video, called “Kick Ass,” was stored in a password-protected folder and within the video they found a file called “Sexy Tanja.” Further analysis of this file eventually revealed that it contained more than 100 concealed unencrypted documents describing Al Qaeda plans and operations.
A video file has ample room for concealing documents, and would be relatively easy to distribute. In Maqsood Lodin’s memory stick, the porn video contained hidden terrorist training manuals in pdf form in English, German and Arabic, along with numerous documents detailing planned future Al Qaeda attacks, and lessons learned from previous operations.* the comedy sketch writes itself.
Upwelling across the tropical Pacific Ocean is projected to weaken in accordance with a reduction of the atmospheric overturning circulation1, enhancing the increase in sea surface temperature relative to other regions in response to greenhouse-gas forcing. In the central Pacific, home to one of the largest marine protected areas and fishery regions in the global tropics, sea surface temperatures are projected to increase by 2.8 °C by the end of this century2, 3, 4. Of critical concern is that marine protected areas may not provide refuge from the anticipated rate of large-scale warming, which could exceed the evolutionary capacity of coral and their symbionts to adapt5.I am, like George Costanza, no marine biologist, but that does sound like a heck of an increase in sea surfaces temperatures in waters that are already pretty warm.
Carbon dioxide and light are two major prerequisites of photosynthesis. Rising CO2 levels in oceanic surface waters in combination with ample light supply are therefore often considered stimulatory to marine primary production1, 2, 3. Here we show that the combination of an increase in both CO2 and light exposure negatively impacts photosynthesis and growth of marine primary producers. When exposed to CO2 concentrations projected for the end of this century4, natural phytoplankton assemblages of the South China Sea responded with decreased primary production and increased light stress at light intensities representative of the upper surface layer. The phytoplankton community shifted away from diatoms, the dominant phytoplankton group during our field campaigns.So how does the increased light happen in future? This seems to be explained in the last part of the abstract:
Future shoaling of upper-mixed-layer depths will expose phytoplankton to increased mean light intensities5. In combination with rising CO2 levels, this may cause a widespread decline in marine primary production and a community shift away from diatoms, the main algal group that supports higher trophic levels and carbon export in the ocean.Well, there you go. More news of the giant climatological and ecological experiment that is underway, and that serious people should take seriously.
One IPCC scientist, who said he didn't want to be drawn into a personal argument with Dr Lovelock, said: "Jim exaggerated the certainties of climate change before, which wasn't helpful then. His recent comments aren't helpful nowJames Annan is also happy to point out that he and others called out Lovelock's extreme pessimism at the time, including Tim Lambert in Australia.
"They will be seized on by people who argue that science is too uncertain to inform policy - and that's absolutely not the case. He's blown too hot, now he's blowing too cold."
Prof Hans von Storch of the Meteorological Institute at the University of Hamburg told BBC News: "Lovelock certainly exaggerated in 2006. It seems that the extreme position on both sides are losing ground, and that is good."
The Japan Times has an editorial on an unusual topic:
An investigation into one of Japan's favorite pastimes — bathing — has found a startling statistic: 14,000 people a year die during bath time. That's nearly three times more deaths than from car accidents, 4,612 people....
Bathing seems such a comforting and pleasant activity that it is hard to associate it with danger. However, the deaths come from several different problems. Some deaths resulted from drowning when bathers fell asleep. Other causes were heart attacks, subarachnoid hemorrhages or strokes from the sudden shift in temperatures. Dehydration and injuries resulting from slipping were also among the causes.
Researchers at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine found last year that the danger of heart attacks is nearly 10 times greater in winter than in summer — and much higher than the risk of cardiac arrest during exercise. The rapid blood pressure drop that happens when getting in the bath stresses the heart more on a cold day, which can lead to a number of complications.
If they're all thrown out, as promised, then the new minister will have to start the process all over again. By the way, the shadow minister is Ian Macfarlane, who came within a bee's willy of negotiating an emissions trading scheme in 2009 with the then minister, Penny Wong.
Presumably he no longer believes in that crazy stuff.
Anyway, aside from whatever carbon abatement costs are imposed by either political party (they both have the same reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020), electricity prices are already set to double by 2017 because of chronic under-investment in east coast transmission and distribution over previous decades.
This price increase cannot be avoided – it is already locked in. In fact, it will be greater than that if the 20 per cent renewable energy target is to be met because renewable generation is always further away, so that transmission costs more.
The only antidote to the huge, looming increase in the price of electricity, not to mention the possibility of brownouts caused by the lack of investment in base load power, including nuclear, is energy efficiency.
Unless urgent action is taken, the rising price of power will destroy manufacturing and retail businesses far more effectively than the internet and the currency, which has a tendency to go down as well as up.
