There have been calls for the sacking of the chancellor of British Columbia's Thompson Rivers University, Nancy Green Raine, after she suggested on a Canadian breakfast show last week that:
"In science, there's almost never black and white. We don't know what next week's weather is going to be. To say in 50 or 100 years, the temperature is going to do this, is a bit of a stretch for me."*
A Canadian government meteorologist joined the public attack, questioned why Greene Raine would offer comment about something on which she is not versed. He noted that no one comes to him for advice on skiing.
Chancellor Nancy Green Raine was once an Olympic skiing champion.
We are expected to be concerned about climate change, and to do so something about climate change, but not expected to make up our own minds on the issue!
Now here's something worth worrying about at youtube.com:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNzWfguDjZU
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* from The Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2006
Jeez you're a numb nuts Ian.
Mr "oversimplification alfoil-the Pacific Ocean " himself. Give me a break !
Albedo is an interesting beast - we would have undertake what are called "field measurements" to see impact forest thinning would have overall - perhaps overflight with what's called a "spectrometer".
Of course given greenies are in charge of the forests and are stuffing the management causing bushfires - perhaps it will be worse as all our forests will be black bodies (charred sticks). But then if all the soil washes away afterwards maybe they will become very bright.
Yes climate models have albedo as an input - WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ! Hello. Duh ! Land surface schemas etc. There's also surface roughness and stomatal conductance to worry about too.
Areas of high insolation have what we call more "cloud".
Gee Ian - we seem to have more than one variable at once to contend with - maybe there are interactions too - this why scientists use what are called "MODELS". Say "modul". Gee who would have thought that !
Here's some envelope fuel for you:
Climate Effects of Global Land Cover Change
Gibbard, S G ; Caldeira, K ; Bala, G ; Phillips, T ; Wickett, M
Publication Date 2005 Aug 24
Resource Relation Journal: Geophysical Research Letters; Journal Volume: 32
There are two competing effects of global land cover change on climate: an albedo effect which leads to heating when changing from grass/croplands to forest, and an evapotranspiration effect which tends to produce cooling. It is not clear which effect would dominate in a global land cover change scenario. We have performed coupled land/ocean/atmosphere simulations of global land cover change using the NCAR CAM3 atmospheric general circulation model. We find that replacement of current vegetation by trees on a global basis would lead to a global annual mean warming of 1.6 C, nearly 75% of the warming produced under a doubled CO2 concentration, while global replacement by grasslands would result in a cooling of 0.4 C. These results suggest that more research is necessary before forest carbon storage should be deployed as a mitigation strategy for global warming. In particular, high latitude forests probably have a net warming effect on the Earth's climate.
What a classic bit of oversimplification to the point of stupidity, Luke. To say that forestry is bad for albedo begs the question, which forestry?
Planting a new forest in an existing paddock reduces albedo but the regular partial harvesting of an existing native forest will increase albedo, put the harvested wood in carbon storage, and allow the retained forest to re-absorb the same volume of removed carbon in less time than it takes the harvested carbon to be emitted.
Perhaps someone should have told that to Keto and Beattie before they shut down 850,000 hectares of native forest and replaced it with plantations that are performing at only a sad fraction of their inflated expectations.
And your link to the UK study only highlights the poverty of current scientific research on the whole issue.
On one hand we have a high profile report into the net gains and losses of a land use change that involves a switch from a 12% albedo to a 17% albedo in a zone of lower insolation. And on the other hand we have the guy who provided that link dumping scorn on the very idea that measures that could shift albedo from 3.5% to 90% in the high insolation zone should be investigated.
And if you agree that the IPCC and the AGO should be measuring the impact of albedo as primary input to climate models, but do not, then surely you must also agree that the existing models are wrong?
And it would also seem appropriate to reflect on the fact that a shift in albedo from 3.5% to 90% in a high insolation zone would need only a fraction of the area to deliver the same cooling outcome as a 5% shift in a low insolation zone.