The front page of today's Australian has no less than three clangers, all in passing.
1) Reference to "carbon pollution"!! Carbon pollution? What the hell is that? I thought carbon was an essential part of life?
2) Reference to the "ailing Murray Darling Basin". Perhaps they mean "ailing" from excessive water flows!
3) "Ailing" from "excessive farmer allocations". Allocations in the last two drought constrained years for which figures are available were only 3,500GLs and 3,000GLs respectively, not the 13,700GLs that the Plan keeps referring to and which it wants to reduce by only 3/4,000GLs.
What a strange world!
29 December, 2010
21 December, 2010
Climate Change
A quote from Joanne Nova in an article in last Saturday's Weekend Australian
"The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen. It includes some of the brightest: two with Nobel prizes in physics, four NASA
astronauts, 9000 PhDs in science, and another 20,000 science graduates to cap it off. A recent US Senate minority report contained 1000 names of eminent scientists who are sceptical, and the term professor pops up more than 500 times in that list."
"The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen. It includes some of the brightest: two with Nobel prizes in physics, four NASA
astronauts, 9000 PhDs in science, and another 20,000 science graduates to cap it off. A recent US Senate minority report contained 1000 names of eminent scientists who are sceptical, and the term professor pops up more than 500 times in that list."
18 December, 2010
Murray Darling Basin Plan
18.12.2010
The market researchers/analysts tell me that you wont win a "counter-intuitive" argument. Because people have been conditioned by repetitive claims of a particular point of view, to forthrightly state the opposite is likely to be dismissed out of hand. So they advise coming at the issue in a more subtle or different way. Sorry,but I am just not built that way! I like to think that I seek after truth and get emotionally upset when I see claims that I regard as untruthful. I do understand that there are deep philosophical arguments about what is truth, but let's keep it simple.
The debate about our inland rivers is a good example. It seems to me that the (conditioned) starting point for most commentators is that it is taken as a given that "our rivers are unhealthy and that this is due to taking too much water out of them". The MDB Plan certainly starts from that accepted position. I think that both the lack of health and the excessive extraction claims, are untrue. (And this is where your counter-intuition is triggered and I've lost you!) But, please read on.
It is a fact that the Murray Darling Basin has never been more sustainably productive. Yes, it has always been subject to huge variability, and there is no better example than the last ten years of record low rain (and run-off) and now massive floods. We must stop claiming that the natural results of dryness amount to river “ill health” and blaming that on extractions, when low availability has meant very low allocations/extractions (if any). Our forebears did a much better job than they are being given credit for.
A significant exception is the acid sulphate soils of the Lower Lakes. Not allowing salt water in, as happened naturally in dry times, has been a gross error and the evaporation losses of fresh water are indefensible. Certainly we can manage the system better, but let’s concentrate on making the cake bigger and stop all of this self flagellation and accept the dominance of Nature. Examine the numbers!
The MDB Plan keeps talking about the upper limit for extractions of 13,700GL. It never mentions that total extractions in 2008/9 (the most recent years for which figures are available) were only 3,500GL. In other words, the allocations governed by the water sharing plans for each major river, would seem to be working well and this self-correcting mechanism is doing just what it was designed to do. Focusing on reducing water licenses/entitlements and ignoring allocations really makes no sense. Likewise the oft repeated statement that "our rivers are over-allocated" most commonly reveals a lack of understanding of just how the system works.
The market researchers/analysts tell me that you wont win a "counter-intuitive" argument. Because people have been conditioned by repetitive claims of a particular point of view, to forthrightly state the opposite is likely to be dismissed out of hand. So they advise coming at the issue in a more subtle or different way. Sorry,but I am just not built that way! I like to think that I seek after truth and get emotionally upset when I see claims that I regard as untruthful. I do understand that there are deep philosophical arguments about what is truth, but let's keep it simple.
The debate about our inland rivers is a good example. It seems to me that the (conditioned) starting point for most commentators is that it is taken as a given that "our rivers are unhealthy and that this is due to taking too much water out of them". The MDB Plan certainly starts from that accepted position. I think that both the lack of health and the excessive extraction claims, are untrue. (And this is where your counter-intuition is triggered and I've lost you!) But, please read on.
It is a fact that the Murray Darling Basin has never been more sustainably productive. Yes, it has always been subject to huge variability, and there is no better example than the last ten years of record low rain (and run-off) and now massive floods. We must stop claiming that the natural results of dryness amount to river “ill health” and blaming that on extractions, when low availability has meant very low allocations/extractions (if any). Our forebears did a much better job than they are being given credit for.
A significant exception is the acid sulphate soils of the Lower Lakes. Not allowing salt water in, as happened naturally in dry times, has been a gross error and the evaporation losses of fresh water are indefensible. Certainly we can manage the system better, but let’s concentrate on making the cake bigger and stop all of this self flagellation and accept the dominance of Nature. Examine the numbers!
The MDB Plan keeps talking about the upper limit for extractions of 13,700GL. It never mentions that total extractions in 2008/9 (the most recent years for which figures are available) were only 3,500GL. In other words, the allocations governed by the water sharing plans for each major river, would seem to be working well and this self-correcting mechanism is doing just what it was designed to do. Focusing on reducing water licenses/entitlements and ignoring allocations really makes no sense. Likewise the oft repeated statement that "our rivers are over-allocated" most commonly reveals a lack of understanding of just how the system works.
Cheer Up!
Extract from today's Economist magazine:-
"It may not feel like it in the West, but this is, in many ways, the best of times. Hundreds of millions are climbing out of poverty. The internet gives ordinary people access to information that even the most privileged scholar could not have dreamed of a few years ago. Medical advances are conquering diseases and extending lifespans. For most of human history, only a privileged few have reasonably been able to hope that the future would be better than the present. Today the masses everywhere can. That is surely reason to be optimistic."
Happy Christmas.
"It may not feel like it in the West, but this is, in many ways, the best of times. Hundreds of millions are climbing out of poverty. The internet gives ordinary people access to information that even the most privileged scholar could not have dreamed of a few years ago. Medical advances are conquering diseases and extending lifespans. For most of human history, only a privileged few have reasonably been able to hope that the future would be better than the present. Today the masses everywhere can. That is surely reason to be optimistic."
Happy Christmas.
08 December, 2010
The World Has Been Cooling for 15 Years
The following is an extract from the UK Daily Mail:-
"But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate
over climate change as a whole.Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.
This isn't meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.
According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.
Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.
Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a little noticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no
statistically significant warming' since 1995.
One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports. He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'
After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2,and that the 'travesty' was not the 'pause' but science's failure to explain it.
The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?"
"But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate
over climate change as a whole.Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.
This isn't meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.
According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.
Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.
Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a little noticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no
statistically significant warming' since 1995.
One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports. He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'
After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2,and that the 'travesty' was not the 'pause' but science's failure to explain it.
The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?"
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