CSIRO Empirical evidence that humans cause climate change / archived / read-only

• The value of 33 deg. C represents the difference between the observed average surface temperature of the Earth, and the estimated surface temperature if there was no atmosphere.

  The 33 deg. C of surface warming is not actually a measure of the greenhouse warming – it represents the balance between TWO competing effects: a greenhouse warming effect of about 60 deg. C (the so-called “pure radiative equilibrium” case), and a convective cooling effect of about 30 deg. C. When these two are combined, we get the real-world observed “radiative-convective equilibrium” case.

  This has been known since at least 1964 (Manabe and Strickler, 1964). It was also discussed in Dick Lindzen’s 1990 paper, Some Coolness Regarding Global Warming, Roy Spencer

• The rest of the 33 C of warming for the ordinary greenhouse effect, comes from the cooling by wind (conduction) and of course over the oceans and other water by evaporation.
• One may avoid the term “greenhouse” since there is a huge difference between what is happening and the workings of a glass house, but there is absolutely no doubt that introducing even about 40 ppmv (c.f. present level of 400 ppmv) will also add about 9 C to the earth’s temperature (Teff) just as the 400 ppmv does now.
• The presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does contribute (I believe from careful calculations) about 9 degrees C towards the defined 33 C, at which we enjoy an earth, warmer than the easily determined 255 K of an earth in thermodynamic equilibrium with the sun. (Note: The 288 K which is the “measured” temperature, Teff, is actually a measurement of the average intensity of radiation from the earth’s surface. It is obtained by adding the fourth power of the temperature (T^4) at every point where the measurements are made (and used by HADCRUT, NASA, GISS etc…) over the earth, then dividing by the number of sampled points and taking the fourth root to obtain Teff (IPCC). If you take the real linear “average”, the usual “mean” temperature, you get something like 260 K. (For the bare earth for which the 255 K Teff applies, the mean temperature is only a freezing [liquid nitrogen like], 180 K, because the calculation of course includes the assumption fro an airless earth, that one side of the earth is cooled to zero, as are the poles at the 90 degree angle to the sun. However, this 180 K is a measure of the mean energy of the earth, as is the mean temperatures which would come out at about 265 K for the earth as we know it with a warming atmosphere. These lower temperatures are a measure of the actual energy trapped in the atmosphere and the earth whereas Teff depends on the temperature and also on how the temperature is distributed across the globe – changing the distribution can change the value of Teff upwards, even though the amount of energy on earth may have fallen. I believe this may well be the case for the much lauded El Nino peaks which occur when some large areas of the earth warm by up to 4 C while other areas are cooler. So as soon as you introduce a bit of air, even with CO2, you will get some redistribution of heat from the tropics and a much warmer earth. (BTW, Jack Barrett, in spite of his findings regarding the non-event for CO2, believes that without some CO2, we would have a ”snow-ball” earth.

• Joseph Fourier (1827) Memoire sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planetaires".
  • Fourier, in 1824/1827, was writing about thermal conduction and the applicability of his Analytical Theory of Heat to transparent fluids such as the air in hotboxes and the atmosphere. Neither his 1824 nor 1827 papers have anything to do with the greenhouse effect. The transition from radiation-dominant to contact dominant heat transfer regimes within materials in thermal contact, mentioned by Fourier, has nothing to do with backradiation heating, however similar it may seem on a superficial reading. Backradiation heating would, in fact, make Fourier's Law impossible because heat can't dissipate if it can simply be relayed up the thermal gradient as often as it is relayed down the thermal gradient. This also neglects the fact that Fourier's Law defines the total heat transfer including radiative transfer, contact transfer, Fermi Gas flow, electron swaps and any imponderables such as the odd bit of undetectable backradiation.
  • The applicability of Fourier's Law to thermal gradients in liquids and gases, including the atmosphere, was the point of Fourier (1824, see p. 166) and Fourier (1827, see p. 600) if taken in the context of the range of publications to which he refers. If the greenhouse effect is taken as not contradicting or otherwise violating Fourier's Law, why not simply dispense with the guesswork and use Fourier's Law to model the behaviour of heat in the atmosphere?
• Svante Arrhenius (1896) "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Earth". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Arrhenius' greenhouse law reads as follows:
  if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression. This means that adding equal quantities of CO2 results in ever decreasing response.
  • Arrhenius' conception of the greenhouse effect is neither mathematically consistent nor, in his own estimation, testable by any practical or available means. Although Robert Wood disagreed and went ahead with a test of his own, an untestable theory is unscientific.

• John Tyndall (1872) "Contributions to molecular physics in the domain of radiant heat"
  • Are you referring to experiments done in the 1800s with CO2 in a bottle in the laboratory, which were before quantum theory and high resolution spectroscopy?
  • Why are you confident that the bottle adequately represents the 62 different types of atomic collisions in the atmosphere between all the major and minor gases present?
    • [img: Point_1-Reactions.jpg] From Atomic and Space Physics, Green and Wyatt, Addison Wesley
  • Why are you confident that the bottle adequately represents all the interactions by conduction, convection, radiation and latent heat that occur in the atmosphere?
• Jack Barrett (1995) CO2 is expected to increase global temperature, but the extent of the warming and the mechanism of the warming are still debatable,
  • At the DECHEMA colloquium, held in Frankfurt on 11th Oct, 2001, Hug and Barrett gave papers that expressed doubts about the details of the manner that spectroscopy has been applied by members of the IPCC in coming to their conclusions about future climate change. IPCC proponents Bakan, Birk and Hollmann opposed the views.
  • Barrett and Hug's conclusions
  • The mechanism of global warming must be defined in a better manner so that all relevant processes are represented.
  • It must be recognized that Kirchhoff’s law applies only to systems in thermal equilibrium.
  • The proper effects of line broadening must be recognized. That line broadening occurs at all indicates that collisional processes are important.
  • The value of the atmospheric sensitivity given by the IPCC seems to be too large. If the IPCC value for atmospheric sensitivity is exaggerated by a factor of about four, the predicted increase in temperature for a doubling of carbon dioxide will be too small to be discernible against the background of natural variability of the climate.
  • The ignoring of the spectral effects of water vapour seems to be the reason for the exaggeration of the sensitivity.
  • The failure of models to settle the sign of the water vapour feedback induces doubts about the whole process of modelling at the present time.
  • The concept of local thermodynamic equilibrium is given different interpretations and leads to errors in applications of theory to the atmospheric problem.
  • The kinetics of the carbon cycle needs further consideration. If the CO2 content of the atmosphere is not going to reach double that of the pre-industrial era, the whole of the IPCC approach to future climate change is in doubt.

• What special definition, if any, of the Greenhouse Effect is used by the CSIRO and what is the key, testable, physical mechanism which both drives this special variation of the greenhouse effect and distinguishes it from the greenhouse effect, as it is more widely understood, as well as from other thermodynamic processes such as thermal conduction and the influence of heat capacity on the process of thermal conduction?

• The whole "hotbox is not a planet" argument neglects the fact that experimental controls exist to remove possible alternate causes from an experiment. In this sense, a complex planetary system can be a highly inappropriate environment for an "open air" experiment because whatever results we observe could be unexpectedly influenced by any number of phenomena. We see this in the disparity between the results of Pratt and Nahle who, separately, used thin films for the transparent media of their control enclosures. I have, by the way, confirmed both Pratt's and Nahle's results, in this case, noting that a little wind made all the difference. So, when we look at a mechanism, we must isolate the mechanism itself and compare with a control. This is what makes Wood's experiment so very relevant to this question.

• It is commonly argued that hotboxes get saturated by atmospheric IR and, in fact, this argument was first made in Abbot's 1909 attempted rebuttal of Wood(1909). Ignoring the differences of emission spectra between carbon dioxide and glass, backradiation heating still predicts that the bottom of the control will receive measurably less radiation than the total radiation received at the bottom of the test enclosure.

  While the control gets the 1. full measure of visible radiation 2. Initial backradiation from the atmosphere 3. plus the spit series backradiation of infrared atmospheric back radiation exchanged with the atmosphere.

  the IR-absorbing transparent medium for the test enclosure does not present a complete barrier to atmospheric IR-backradiation. So the test enclosure gets the: 1. full measure of visible radiation 2. Initial backradiation of the IR-absorbing transparent test medium 3. split series backradiation of test medium backradiation exchanged with the test medium 4. split series backradiation of atmospheric backradiation exchanged with the atmosphere

  In the event that there is a greenhouse effect which, by definition, is based on the unconfirmed mechanism of backradiation heating, the test enclosure will always receive more radiation than the control enclosure and, all other things being equal, there would never be a circumstance where the control enclosure is warmer than the test enclosure unless a completely different mechanism, such as optical refrigeration, is in play.

• Regarding the application of the Stefan Equation to the determination of surface temperature from incoming radiation (thereby eliminating emissivity questions that apply to outgoing radiation temperature): the presence of a thermal gradient alters the process greatly and, further, raises the question of where the mean equivalent absorbing surface exists, relative to the thermal gradient. This is because the radiation, measured as heat flux across a discreet surface area is actually distributed throughout the entire volume spanned by the thermal gradient arising from the radiation in question. And, because the atmosphere acts as a heat reservoir during the day (with the exception of carbon dioxide and water which leak a considerable amount of heat out to space) we can expect temperatures to build beyond simplistically calculated norms at pressures above that of the mean equivalent absorbing surface (as opposed to the crustal surface, the tropopause, the stratopause, the mesopause or the thermopause for that matter).
  • http://greenhouse.geologist-1011.net/
• This is just to demonstrate that, on the subject of terrestrial temperatures, there are other, more parsimonious approaches which also happen to fit the facts without introducing unnecessary hobgoblins.

• If there is such a thing as a "greenhouse material" then there must be a universally quantifiable property defining either the number of degrees kelvin or the number of watts per square metre by which the "greenhouse material" deviates from the same in a "non-greenhouse" or standard material - per watt per square metre of incoming radiation.

  The reason why there is no unification of modern greenhouse effect hypotheses or "models" is that the greenhouse effect has never been confirmed, much less subjected to the necessary process of controlled, real-world measurement and quantification to establish the existence and variation of a corresponding S.I. unit.

  Moreover, such a unit would either be a new and independent thermodynamic property in its own right or it would be a function of existing thermodynamic properties such as thermal conduction and heat capacity because -in the real world- the temperatures of materials, for any given circumstances, are dictated by the material's thermodynamic properties.

• Beck said: In literature we can find more than 200 000 directly measured CO2 data since 1800 from which I have estimated the annual CO2 background averages since 1826 to 1960, the end of the measurements by chemical methods.
• Quoting from Beck: CO2 background level and the sea surface temperature (SST) CO2 background from 1826 to 2008 shows a very good correlation ( r= 0,719 using data since 1870) to global SST (Kaplan, KNMI), with a CO2 lag of 1 year behind SST from cross correlation (maximum correlation: 0,7204). Kuo et al. 1990 derived 5-month time lag from MLO data alone compared to air temperature. [img: Point2CO2_Beck.jpg] Annual atmospheric CO2 background level from 1856 to 2008 compared to SST (Kaplan, KNMI); red line, CO2 MBL reconstruction from 1826 to 1959 (Beck 2010); CO2 1960-2008: (Mauna Loa); blue line, annual SST (Kaplan) from 1856 -2003; SST= sea surface temperature

• On the scale of atmospheric composition, the isotopic composition of volcanogenic CO2 is effectively indistinguishable from fossil fuel CO2 due to the complete lack of statistically significant carbon isotope determinations for each of the contributing volcanic and tectonic provinces. Moreover, molar oxidation estimates cannot be used to constrain volcanogenic CO2 output because such estimates neglect the fact that carbon is not the only abundant element on the planet that preferentially combines with oxygen. It is only through emission monitoring taken in statistically significant empirical samples for each volcanic province that we may calculate a scientific estimate of total worldwide volcanic CO2 emission and perhaps, with statistically significant carbon isotope data for each volcanic province, we may one day be able to distinguish volcanic and industrial CO2 contributions in the atmosphere. [link]
• Furthermore, there is simply no established volcanic CO2 fingerprint by which we may distinguish atmospheric proportions of anthropogenic and volcanogenic contributions. This leaves us with no empirical method by which we may attribute the 20th century rise in CO2 to human energy consumption.

Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy. We are occasionally reminded that fossil fuel burning is depleting atmospheric oxygen at a rate of almost 1000 tons per second. There are about 32 million seconds in a year, so that somewhere around 30 billion tons of O2 are being converted to CO2 annually. There are about 1,200,000 billion metric tons of O2 in the atmosphere, so we can keep burning fossil fuels at the present rate for 40,000 years before we run out of oxygen. By then, all of the world's fossil fuel supply will have long since been exhausted. For a more complete, but less detailed, discussion of this topic see Et tu 02 by Wallace Broecker.

If we take the worlds supply of fossil fuel to be 10,000 billion metric tons of carbon, as per http://genomicscience.energy.gov/carboncycle/index.shtml and we oxidize all of it we would get about 37,000 billion metric tons of CO2, and about 27,000 billion metric tons of O2 would have been consumed. Some additional O2 would have also been consumed by oxidation of hydrogen in the (hydrocarbon) fuel, so that roughly 38,000 billion metric tons of oxygen would have been consumed. This is about 3.3 percent of the atmosphere's oxygen. Such a loss would be equivalent to increasing your elevation from sea level to about 330 meters, or about 1100 feet.

• [img: Point3.2.1NSOxygen-b.jpg] In the Northern hemisphere monthly CO2 and oxygen levels move in opposite directions In the Southern hemisphere there is virtually no monthly CO2 fluctuation but the oxygen fluctuation is normal. CO2 is obviously not well mixed on a monthly timescale. Powerful factors are at work on the monthly scale.

• [img: CO2andEmissions.jpg] Human emissions don't seem to have any short term effect on atmospheric CO2 levels or the GISS CO2 dataset is heavily smoothed.

• [img: SourcesHumanand_Volcanos.jpg] The dips in human emissions at about 1980 and 1990 are coincident with volcanic eruptions. Why should human emissions drop on volcanic eruptions? The cynic might suspect that volcanic emissions have been subtracted from some other quantity to get human emissions.

• A Correlation is only a prerequisite to causation [link].

• These graphs are estimates not empirical evidence.

• This opinion is not "empirical evidence". The behaviour of natural sources and sinks is probably not well enough understood to support this opinion.

• 4.1.A This graph does not show any enhancement or change.

• Decadal variations in atmospheric water vapor from [link].
• [img: Point_4.C.A-graph.jpg]

• What caused the cooling from 1880-1910 and from 1940-1980?
• What are the datasets used here? Are we to be impressed by the organisations? An appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.
• How much of this claimed 1 degC per century trend is cause by Urban Heat Island effect and Rutherglen style adjustments?
  • Subsequently McKitrick and Michaels (2007) concluded that about half the reported warming trend in global-average land surface air temperature in 1980–2002 resulted from local land-surface changes and faults in the observations. Schmidt (2009) undertook a quantitative analysis that supported AR4 conclusions that much of the reported correlation largely arose due to naturally occurring climate variability and model over-fitting and was not robust. Taking these factors into account, modified analyses by McKitrick (2010) and McKitrick and Nierenberg (2010) still yielded significant evidence for such contamination of the record. Temperature Data Quality
• What caused the cooling from 1880-1910 and 1940-1980?
• This graph shows organisations not datasets. Are we supposed to be impressed by the organisations? An appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.

• Original fuzzy CSIRO graph [img: Point5-Graph3.jpg] http://www.cntr.csiro.au/sealevel/thermal_expansion_ocean_heat_fisheries.html
• https://c13895308.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/uploads/891a75c9da22ec3335be659093d824b6db5a56a7/preview/Point_5-Graph_3.jpg

• [img: Point5-SurfacetempsWarming.jpg] Furthermore, Jones et al. (2016) have found that surfaces temperatures for the Southern Ocean – which surrounds the entire Antarctic continent – have dropped significantly since the late 1970s, as they show in the graph from their paper. Jones et al 2016

• [img: Point5-PacificHeatContent.jpg] <A href="http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~blinsley/Dr.B.KLinsley/Indonesia&PacificIntermediateWater_files/Rosenthal.Linsley.Oppo%202013%20Pac.Ocean.Heat.pdf">Rosenthal et al., 2013
• “We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1°C and 1.5°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades.”

• Malcolm Roberts (MR): asked: What in the 2000-year climate record indicates impending danger? CSIRO said they had not said anything about danger. MR: No, but we’re asking a question. Is there anything that indicates impending danger? CSIRO said that it depends on the definition of danger......danger can be quite an emotive word..... interpreting whether there is danger is ultimately a question for the people of Australia to decide. MR: Well, Greg Hunt – and I’m looking at Alex here, not for an explanation but just to emphasise that Greg Hunt in particular has said that his climate policies rely entirely on the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the IPCC. And so he’s saying, we will end up in danger unless we do something to cut the use of hydrocarbon fuels. And so, if he relies upon the CSIRO’s advice, is that where he’s getting his imminent danger from? CSIRO said that the interpretation of danger is up to the Australian public, and the Minister MR: So, the Minister has drawn those conclusions. ..... independent of the CSIRO. You’ve presented him with the temperature changes and the causal analysis and he’s gone: Oh my God, we’ve got to do something. CSIRO said it's probably best to ask the Minister if he’s done that. MR: Okay. Ministerial Adviser indicated that the Minister would be happy to have a conversation about that and advised that’s definitely a conversation for the Minister not for the CSIRO. MR: Sure. Okay. So, the CSIRO just presents the data and leaves the policy decisions to the Ministers? CSIRO confirmed that is correct.

• The full Vostok data from which the ups and downs have been extracted. [img: Vostok_overall.jpg]
• Vostok peak at 410000 BP [img: Vostok420000up.jpg] The minor valley at -390,000 BC shows CO2 rising first.
• Vostok valley at -350,000 BC. [img: Vostok_350000.jpg] CO2 and Temperature are moving together.
• Vostok peak at -320,000 BC [img: Vostok_320000.jpg] Perhaps CO2 slightly leading temperature.
• Vostok valley at -250,000 BC [img: Vostok_250000.jpg] Generally CO2 and temperature in sync. Perhaps temperature leads slightly in the falls.
• Vostok peak at -235,000 BC [img: Vostok_235000.jpg] Temperature leading on the fall. In sync elsewhere.
• Vostok peak at -127,000 BC [img: Vostok_150000.jpg] Temperature leads the fall but in sync elsewhere.
• Vostok peak at -9,000 BC [img: Vostok_9000.jpg] CO2 and temperature generally in sync.

• GISP2 swings at 45,000 BC [img: GISP2_45000.jpg] Some big swing in CO2 and temperature but not well correlated.
• GISP2 swings at 16,000 BC [img: GISP2_16000.jpg] Some correlation but one period of obvious divergence.

• [img: EPICA_13000.jpg]
• [img: EPICA_5000.jpg] Fairly constant temperature but steadily rising CO2.

• [img: LawDome_1800-b.jpg] The graph was stopped at 1800 before the rapid rise of CO2, possibly due to human emissions. Sampling intervals: CO2 8 years, Temp 4 years

• [img: Post_1850.jpg] There are two 30 year periods of falling temperature while CO2 is rising. For the last 50 years both are rising together. The temperature data may include the Rutherglen adjustments.

• [img: Satellite_age.jpg] The 2 big El Nino peaks are visible. On a monthly or annual scale, CO2 and temperature seem unrelated.

• [img: TemperatureElNino_Satellite-b.jpg]

  More detail: Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature

• Sources [img: TSICO2Temp-Sources.jpg]

• Low solar activity means more Central European floods [img: Point_6-3-Short.jpg]
• [img: Point_6-3Long.jpg]
• Czymzik, M., Muscheler, R. and Brauer, A. 2016. Solar modulation of flood frequency in central Europe during spring and summer on inter-annual to multi-centennial timescales. Climate of the Past 12: 799-805.

• [img: ENSOCO21300.jpg] Truncated at 1800 to avoid the big CO2 increase after that.

• It has been hotter in the past and warmed at 1°C per century in the past when CO2 was below 300ppm, so how can internal variability be ruled out? [img: Point6-41DegPerC.jpg] Every possible 100 year sequence was examined with linear regression to determine it's trend in degC per century. The trends were collected in the bins indicated by the table headings. Data after 1900 was excluded to leave only the precedents. 1 degC per century is not unprecedented. The trend for the current century may well turn out to be more like 0.5 degC per century when all the Rutherglen type adjustments are removed, in which case the precedents increase.
• [img: Point6-41DegPerC-LawDome.jpg] 8.4% of Law Dome century trends are 1 degC per century or greater. 41 in total.

• While recent temperatures are higher than say 60 years ago, 8000 years ago temperate rainforests in Australia were well south of Sydney and the summer and winter minimums were 5°C higher while the winter and summer maximums were around 2°C higher. The Medieval Warm Period is well mapped in the Northern Hemisphere between 50°N and 70°N and the equivalent position in the Southern Hemisphere is south of South Africa, Australia and South America.
• [img: Point_6-PacificOcean.jpg]
• However, in 2013, Professor Yair Rosenthal from Columbia University and others (using oxygen isotope ratios in benthic forms that live on the deep ocean floor) showed that the Deep Water Ocean temperature of the Pacific Floor during the Medieval Warm period was 0.9°C warmer than today; a situation impossible unless the ocean temperature south of the Southern Convergence was higher at that time. This provided clear evidence that modern temperatures are not unprecedented and that scary statements about modern temperatures are ill-informed.

• Satellite measurements of the troposphere (where the greenhouse effect occurs) show that the models overestimate warming outside the 95% confidence bound. This indicates that models are of no value as a tool in climate studies.
• [img: SGGlobalMeanTLTAnomaly.jpg] Source

• The lack of change in temperature for early 2000s is real.
  • It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims. [img: Point6Hiatus-Graph.jpg] Source: Nature
  • John C. Fyfe, Gerald A. Meehl, Matthew H. England, Michael E. Mann, Benjamin D. Santer, Gregory M. Flato, Ed Hawkins, Nathan P. Gillett, Shang-Ping Xie, Yu Kosaka & Neil C. Swart This is a significant document as some of the authors are IPCC stalwarts.
• The models have not reproduced the global average temperature changes since 1850 with the various pause warm cycles as it seems that they were tuned to the 1975-1998 period and then significantly failed as temperature and CO2 failed to track each other in the 1998-2016 period.
• The debate on the predicted hotspot in the tropical troposphere still rages and its existence has not been proven. Dr Steven Japar who was involved in the 1995 and 2001 reports resigned from the UN IPCC on the basis that 'temperature measurements show the hot zone (i.e. a zone predicted by the models in the mid-troposphere) is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made by them"

• Is ex-CSIRO Professor Mark Howden a trustworthy scientist or political activist?

  • With the recent extreme storm events in South Australia and subsequent blackout, Australia's energy security has been thrown into sharp relief. An increasing number of extreme weather events such as this are expected as a result of climate change. The crisis highlights that Australia needs to up the ante in addressing climate related risk across all sectors of our society.

    Meanwhile, September ended the 16-month streak of record warm monthly global temperatures. But September also demonstrated the highest average global land temperatures ever recorded for the month and global average temperatures for the first nine months of 2016 break all previous records.

    Following last year's Paris Climate Agreement, the next round of UN climate change negotiations, COP 22, kick off in Marrakesh on 7 November. We'll be running a public lecture to discuss implementation of the Agreement in the week of 22nd November - stay tuned for more details.

    Regards

    Professor Mark Howden Director, Climate Change Institute

• Is Mark Stafford-Smith a trustworthy scientist?

  • Planet Under Pressure Declaration When the conference ended, Dr Stafford-Smith co-drafted with a Dr Lidia Brito the conference’s “Declaration”. As one breathless environment reporter from the New York Times introduced it, humanity’s anti-green obtuseness could hurt the earth as badly as “meteoric collisions”.[13] The key tract from the Smith/Brito manifesto is:

    “Fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions is required to overcome barriers to progress and to move to effective Earth-system governance…Current understanding supports the creation of a Sustainable Development Council within the UN system to integrate social, economic and environmental policy at the global level.” [14] [Link]

• Did CSIRO's attendance at Planet under pressure help its trustworthy image?