A Man Talking Sense on the Big Picture-Three NZ's

The NAB's February Agribusiness View contains an interesting article written by Simon Talbot, Chief Executive Office of the National Farmers’ Federation, noting that in 2014/15, farm gate income
increased by 8 per cent to $57 billion, and this is expected to rise to about $105 billion by 2030.

This prompted him to comment: "We need to establish the milestones that will enable agriculture
to double in size over the next 15 years.” He noted, however, that one of the biggest threats to
future growth is the lack of human capital.

“If we don’t attract the best people we’re going to struggle to realise our potential and, to do that,
we must make a shift from a drought mentality. Of course there are people who suffer terribly as a
result of drought and our hearts go out to them. The reality is that the vast majority of professional
farmers are engaged in highly productive, innovative agriculture and making good returns.

“People look at New Zealand and think how lucky they are to have such a benign climate, but one
thing the White Paper didn’t mention is that regarding prime agricultural land, Australia has the
equivalent of three New Zealands. We need to rebrand the industry to reflect that.”

Talbot believes these highly-productive areas should be given priority.“People have concerns about backing winners, but it’s not about supporting one area or another,it’s about thinking of ourselves as an agricultural nation and focusing on the most productive land first.

"At the moment, we’re treating agriculture as if the needs are the same across the country and
they’re clearly not. We’re very fortunate that Australia covers every climatic zone so we can grow
every kind of produce, but the different regions need to be managed in different ways.”

Talbot would like to see a deeper national conversation about Australian agriculture.
“For a long time we’ve been considered the poor cousin of other economic sectors, but that’s no
longer the case. Agriculture has the greatest uplift regarding generating wealth for the country and
I quite openly say we have some of the most productive farmers in the world.

"Now we need to listen to what the next generation of farmers wants and be ready to provide the
education and support they need.”

http://business.nab.com.au/agricultural-industry-receives-4bn-boost-15295/

Water-The Basics-From Viv Forbes

Water is essential for all life, and happily it is abundant on our blue watery planet.

However, salty oceans cover 70% of Earth’s surface and contain 97% of Earth’s water. Salt water is great for ocean dwellers but not directly useful for most life on land. Another 2% of Earth’s water is tied up in ice caps, glaciers and permanent snow, leaving just 1% as land-based fresh water.

To sustain life on land, we need to conserve and make good use of this rare and elusive resource.

Luckily, our sun is a powerful nuclear-powered desalinisation plant. Every day, solar energy evaporates huge quantities of fresh water from the oceans. After a stop-off in the atmosphere, most of this water vapour is soon returned to earth as dew, rain, hail and snow – this is the great water cycle. Unfortunately about 70% of this precipitation falls directly back into the oceans and some is captured in frozen wastelands.

Much of the water that falls on land is collected in gullies, creeks and rivers and driven relentlessly by gravity back to the sea by the shortest possible route. Allowing this loss to happen is poor water management. The oceans are not short of water.

Some animals and plants have evolved techniques to maximise conservation of precious fresh water.

Some Australian frogs, on finding their water holes evaporating, will inflate their stomachs with water then bury themselves in a moist mud-walled cocoon to wait for the drought to break. Water buffalo and wild pigs make mud wallows to retain water in their private mud-baths, camels carry their own water supply and beavers build lots of dams.

Some plants have also evolved water saving techniques – bottle trees and desert cacti are filled with water, thirsty humans can even get a drink from the roots and trunks of some eucalypts and many plants produce drought/fire resistant seeds.

Every such natural water conservation or drought-proofing behaviour brings benefits for all surrounding plants and animals.

People have long recognised the importance of conserving fresh water – early settlers built their homes near the best waterholes on the creek and every homestead and shed had its corrugated iron tanks. Graziers built dams and weirs to retain surface water for stock (and fence-crashing wildlife), used contour ripping and good pasture management to retain moisture in soils, and drilled bores to get underground water. And sensible rules have evolved to protect the water rights of down-stream residents.

Rainfall is often a boom and bust affair. Much fresh water is delivered to the land surface suddenly in cyclones, storms and rain depressions. But “The Wet” is always followed by “The Dry”, and droughts and floods are normal climatic events. People who fail to store some of the flood must put up with the drought.

Greens should learn from the beavers. Strings of dams can moderate flood risk, as well as creating drought sanctuaries and secure water for graziers, towns, irrigators and wildlife. Modern cities could not survive without large water storages for drinking water, sanitation, gardens and factories.

Fresh water is also necessary to produce fresh food. We can have fresh milk, butter, cheese, meat, vegetables, nuts and fruit; or we can irrigate the oceans and import fresh food from more sensible countries. And without fresh water and fresh food, there will be no local food processing.

Those infected with the green religion believe we should waste our fresh water by allowing it all to return as quickly as possible to the salty seas. They fight to protect beaver dams and natural lakes, but persistently oppose human dams and lakes. Some even want existing dams destroyed, while wasting billions on energy-hungry desalination and sewerage re-treated plants, pumps and pipelines.

They also want to prohibit man’s production of two drought-defying atmospheric gases, both released by the burning of hydrocarbons – carbon dioxide which makes plants more drought tolerant, and water vapour which feeds the clouds and the rain.

Green water policies are un-sustainable, even suicidal.

Humans must copy the beavers and “Build more Dams”. And help the biosphere by burning more hydrocarbons.

Life-The Full Circle (For Men)

Life-The Full Circle

SUCCESS & MONEY..........

Growing up is a weird notion to wrap your mind around. As you go through life, your perspectives on almost everything will change. How you define success will change as well. Things that you thought were important at the age of 35 will be useless when you're 65. You may not realize it now, but everything will shift. At age 4 success is not peeing in your pants.   At age 12 success is having friends. At age 16 success is having a drivers license. At age 20 success is having sex. At age 35 success is having money. At age 50 success is having money. At age 60 success is having sex. At age 70 success is having a drivers license. At age 75 success is having friends. At age 80 success is not peeing in your pants. It all comes full circle, whether you like it or not. Share this hilarious truth about life with others. May you always have Love to Share, Health to Spare, and Friends who Care.....

Don Aitken

 I am not a scientist, but I can read! There are people whose opinions I value and there are those who are clearly motivated by being rent seekers feeding off the "climate change/global warming industry". The sceptics are accused of being in the pay of "big oil" and the like. There is little comment on all those organisations/institutions who are in the pay of "big government", including thousands of climate scientists.

Don Aitken, a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra is amongst those I admire, others are Freeman Dyson, Nigel Lawson, James Spooner, Lord Fellowes, Lord Ridley, Deepak Lal, Ross McKittrick, Richard Lindzen and John Christy. All highly intelligent people whose views should not be lightly dismissed.

---

Is the planet warming? My perspective on global warming # 4 Posted: 17 Feb 2016 11:38 AM PST The apparently simple question like the one in the title of this essay is in fact almost impossible to answer unless it is specified further. Even then, it has been argued that that it implies a quantity — average global temperature — that is both mathematically and thermodynamically impossible to calculate. Interested readers should go to the link to explore further, but a short-cut is that it is as sensible as referring to the ‘average exchange rate’ of all currencies in the world today, or the average of all the telephone numbers in the telephone directory. Perhaps a prior question is: what is the optimum temperature for human beings and human societies? The assumption underlying the notion of ‘catastrophic’ anthropogenic global warming, after all, is that we are moving away from some kind of optimum towards something dangerous. What is that optimum? It can’t be the period before the Industrial revolution, because that was icily unpleasant, as Judith Curry and others have pointed out. Given the contribution that more carbon dioxide makes to the lives of plants, and therefore animals, I can’t see why another degree or so would be other than beneficial. But, as I have said before, if one wants to talk about the global warming or ‘climate change’ issue, there is no help for it: one has to use the data that we have. And they are not much help, either, because another prior question is:  ‘Warming or not — from when to when?’. Over the last half-million years? The graph looks like this. The present is to the right. On this ice-core evidence (Antarctic) previous interglacials were warmer. You don’t like that — too long ago? What about the time since our own interglacial began? The graph looks like this. Yes, more ice cores, from one place. Alas, that’s all we really have. You’ll notice that the modern period is of much the same warmth as some earlier periods, but not as much as that of the Holocene Optimum. So are we warming? On the evidence of that graph, we seem to go through warm and cold periods, and maybe the long-term trend is a cooling one. Don’t like that? Let’s get to our own present and recent past. Here’s a graph I used a little time ago. It doesn’t go quite to the present. My grandparents, whom I remember quite well, were born in the 1880s, so this whole period is relevant to me. What I take from this graph is more warm and cool phases, though of shorter duration that in the previous graph. There were rising warmth periods, of about the same duration and trend, from 1910 to 1940, and from about 1975 to 2000. There were cooling periods from 1880 to 1910, and from 1940 to 1975. There has been a relatively flat period from 2000 to the present, though this graph only shows the first part of it. What are we to make of all this? Let’s leave carbon dioxide out of it for a moment. The three graphs show that the planet goes through phases of warming and cooling. There are long phases, medium phases and short phases. We seem to be in a short cooling or static phase at the moment, compared to earlier periods. This period will get cooler or warmer in due course. There are many candidate explanations for why all this happens and has happened, and we can leave them out for the the moment, too. But what seems almost indisputable to me is that there hasn’t been some kind of special ‘right’ climate for humans. Our species has had to cope with more and less warmth, as we do at the moment. We haven’t had to deal with a really cold period since the 17th and early 18th centuries, but we will be much better prepared for the next one. If we go into a new warming phase, we’ll cope with that too. Eight years ago, in my ‘Cool Look’ address to the Australian Planning Institute, I said I was prepared to accept  the IPCC’s estimated average increase in temperature over the 20th century of 0.60 plus or minus 0.20C. I still am. Is it a problem? Not on the evidence of the graphs. Is it unprecedented? That was the next issue — the orthodox position is that the warming of our period is unprecedented in human history (and must therefore be our fault). I repeat here a little of what I wrote then. By 10,000 years ago the first small permanent settlements began to appear, as people assembled and domesticated animals, learned how to plant crops, and abandoned being hunter-gatherers. There were then, according to some estimates, about a million of our ancestors. It seems to me to be no coincidence at all that global temperatures had begun to level out. The evidence for these temperatures is based on Greenland and Antarctic ice-core data, and I need to say at once that what happened in Greenland or the South Polar regions may not have happened anywhere else. Average temperatures seem to have remained within a narrow band of about two to three degrees Celsius ever since, save on a few occasions, such as the Mediaeval Warm Period, when English monasteries grew grapes and made wine, and the later ‘Little Ice Age’, when the Thames froze in 1683 and a Frost Fair continued for two months on the ice. On the evidence, present average temperatures are similar to those in the first century AD.  On the face of it, there is nothing especially unprecedented about the 20th century temperature rise, given its ‘agreed’ size. Shifts up and down of that magnitude and more seem to have occurred in the past, and will presumably occur in the future. Climate change is not new, and occurs for reasons that can have nothing to do with us. Orbital changes, sunspots, volcanic eruptions and meteorites have effects on the earth’s climate, and these causes are external to us. We simply have to put up with the changes and adapt what we do to them. Whatever warming that is happening now, and whatever contribution we humans are making to it, have to be seen in that context. Eight years have passed, a great deal more research has been done, and the science is still not at all settled. I’ll stick to what I wrote then. Next: Are we causing the warming? Further reading: I wrote an essay on what had happened since 2008 six years later, and you can see that here. The website has lots of pieces about warming and measurement, because it remains a central intellectual interest  for me. My basic position is that what we have as data is just awful, and no basis for making public policy. But elected governments, responding to insistent cries of approaching doom from the Greens and their sympathisers, desperately search for data, any data, that would allow them to make good policy. I don’t believe such data exist, and that governments should do nothing. Alas, that is not a position that governments like at all — they will be accused of indolence or worse. So we have to discuss the data we have. Hence this essay, and others like it.

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Climate Change-The Facts

If you want a learned,intelligent,objective analysis of the climate change debate issues- have a read of this-https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/HHRG-114-SY-WState-JChristy-20160202.pdf

Global Warming-In Brief

A 'comment' from a certain David Brewer, in the Catallaxy Files last night-

"The global warming narrative is a long chain of causation from industrial emissions to climate disruption – industrial CO2 emissions are not absorbed, they increase radiative forcing, then that is amplified by more water vapour in the upper atmosphere, and the thus-tripled radiative effect then raises temperatures which leads to all sorts of climate shifts and consequent biosphere changes.

The first link in the chain is none too strong – most emissions are reabsorbed and the reabsorption rate is not falling. But the key weak point is step 3 – the amplification of the initial radiative forcing by extra water vapour in the upper troposphere. This is undemonstrated, and cannot be occurring in the way the models say, since the temperature in that part of the atmosphere is hardly going up at all. Just like Semmelweis, we don’t know why, but the fact is the amplification of radiative forcing is not happening.

And so, logically enough, from that point on in the global warming narrative, nothing is happening the way it is supposed to. No rapid surface warming, no rapid ocean temperature rise, no acceleration of sea level rise, no significant change in droughts, floods, cyclones, the monsoon, or other weather patterns, no increase in extinctions, climate-induced deforestation, coral reef loss from water temperature rise etc etc etc.

What is really amazing and in need of explanation is how supposedly intelligent people are so sure of the entire narrative when they couldn’t even tell you the steps in the story, and have no idea what the real evidence is for any of them."

I Couldn't have said it better myself!

Nick Cater and Black Box Thinking-Learning from Mistakes-The Left Should try It.

Some extracted ,out of context, but useful quotes.

The pursuit of equality comes at the expense of liberty.

Left wing philosophers refuse to let the facts get in the way-

If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.