Murray Darling Basin

Both of our competing political leaders are pandering to the Murray mouth fresh water alarmists. Alan Jones with over 1m. listeners to Radio 2GB in Sydney, has been talking about the nonsense of the Government buying non-existent water, that is entitlements when there are no allocations. In an attempt to help him get words around the two key issues I sent him the following email. Pretty patronising of me to try to help one of the very best communicators around, but it is not easy to clearly express.

Dear Alan,
You may recall from our meetings at Bourke (Port of Bourke Hotel and all that), when I was Chairman and CEO of Clyde Agriculture; that I have a passionate interest in getting the truth into the public arena about our rivers and irrigation. It is a big communication challenge and I struggle to get the words right. However, perhaps my latest iteration might help.

There are two issues which 'get at me'.

First, we deal with the massive variability of our rivers by granting irrigation licenses/entitlements, that are subject to seasonal allocations. No, or limited, water, no allocations. Thus, the Government buying licenses, when there is minimal water and thus no allocations, will do nothing for our rivers, but will restrict agricultural production when water supplies are ample.

Second, the issue of "The Barrages" that close the Lower Lakes off from the Southern Ocean while they evaporate their heads off. I can do little better than quote from the website of a Goolwa (SA) based organisation LakesNeedWater-

"Since we started LakesNeedWater over one year ago, our core message has consistently been that the Lower Lakes should have, well, water. This is hardly rocket science after all. Why anyone would believe that holding back seawater and allowing the lakes to dry out is preferable to allowing seawater to mix with freshwater defies logic. Among the great rivers of the world, such as the Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi, the River Murray is alone in being cut off from its mouth. Does anyone honestly believe it is healthy for a river to be separated from the ocean by kilometres of barrages, resulting in the loss of 90% of its historic estuary?

The scaremongers have it all wrong with their single-minded obsession with fresh water in the Lower Lakes. The River Murray needs a healthy estuary, not artificially maintained freshwater lakes. Rivers need estuaries. It really is that simple."

I hope this helps. Keep up the good work.Regards,

David Boyd

ABC TV Coverage of the Lower Lakes Without a Single Mention of the Scandal of "The Barrages". ABC News,7:30 Report,and now Landline.

I am not into conspiracy theories, but sometimes I wonder! The biggest problem of the Lower Lakes is not upstream extractions (with minimal allocations there have been bugger all in recent years anyway); but the downstream blocking of seawater entering the Lakes as it always did when river flows were low, before The Barrages were built. For further background see lakesneedwater.org

You wont get a S.A. funded scientist to publically criticise them, for fear of their funding drying up!

Water Storages and Efficiency

The South Australian based organisation "LakesNeedWater" have a clearly expressed introduction on their website which bears repeating:

"LAKES NEED WATER AND RIVERS NEED ESTUARIES

Since we started LakesNeedWater over one year ago, our core message has consistently been that the Lower Lakes should have, well, water. This is hardly rocket science after all. Why anyone would believe that holding back seawater and allowing the lakes to dry out is preferable to allowing seawater to mix with freshwater defies logic. Among the great rivers of the world, such as the Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi, the River Murray is alone in being cut off from its mouth. Does anyone honestly believe it is healthy for a river to be separated from the ocean by kilometres of barrages, resulting in the loss of 90% of its historic estuary?

The scaremongers have it all wrong with their single-minded obsession with fresh water in the Lower Lakes. The River Murray needs a healthy estuary, not artificially maintained freshwater lakes. Rivers need estuaries. It really is that simple."

Water

I was recently pondering my obsessive interest in water and had a BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious)!
>Some 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by the oceans i.e. salt water.
>Nature provides us with the most wonderful re-cycling system whereby warmth over our oceans causes evaporation and cloud formation, winds moves the cloud around and as it cools (condensation) it falls as beautiful fresh water.
>There is no shortage of total water, but there are often shortages of fresh water.
>From earliest days, man has stored fresh water to deal with these shortages. We don't lie in the rain with our mouths open to meet our drinking needs-rather we store fresh water when it is available to cover for our future drinking needs.
>Storage methods for our drinking and washing requirements need to be "efficient". That mostly means avoiding evaporation. There is plenty of salt water in the oceans to meet cloud formation needs.
>Exactly these same principles apply to storing water for irrigation (food and fibre production)needs. Only the scale is different. We need to store and to store "efficiently".
>This is particularly the case in Australia where we have the most variable rainfall on Earth. Our predecessors did a great job in building water storages-dams.
>We need more, but they need to be deep (valleys)to minimise surface area and thus evaporation and have good catchments.
>Storages also need to be flexible so as to allow flows from smaller events to pass and to take "the top" off the bigger events, both for flood mitigation and storage for future needs.

Climate Change-Famous Forecasts that Failed.

In 1969, Richard Nixon’s presidential advisor, Daniel Moynihan, summarised for the President the general concern of scientists about “the carbon dioxide problem". This report was recently released.
Moynihan’s memo reads, in part:
“It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content in the atmosphere will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth's surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”

These predictions were wide of the mark:

•Rather than increasing by 81 parts per million as the "pretty clearly agreed" experts feared, CO2 rose by only 45 parts per million.

•Rather than spiking by 3.9 C (7 degrees F), the actual temperature increase between 1969 and the year 2000 was a practically imperceptible 0.3 C. Which means the experts were off by 1200 percent.

•Most embarrassing of all, rather than rising 305 cm (10 feet), sea level increased by a paltry 10 cm (3.9 inches). Which means the experts overestimated that particular danger by 2950 percent.

Moral of the story: no one has ever been able to predict the future. Not even highly educated, highly regarded government advisors.
See: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/nixon-was-told-sea-level-would-rise-by.html

Climate Change

In the last few weeks I have been told by a leading geneticist and a retired physicist/nucleur scientist that there is no credible scientific case against the accepted alarmist global warming view. These two and so many others seem quite oblivious to the revelations from East Anglia, the IPCC and the work and views of the likes of McKittrick, Freeman Dyson, and many other highly educated and intelligent authorities.

In my view the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been brought into serious disrepute by the revelations of the emails from the Climate Research Institute of the University of East Anglia, the discrediting of Michael Mann's "hockey stick" theory and many other revelations.


In Australia we have even witnessed the Commonwealth Government having a meeting of public servants to train them in dealing with the sceptics views. How misguided, superior and condescending can you get!

I came across the linked paper which has particular relevance to my agricultural interests and expresses in very moderate language the fundamental views of those who question the so called "settled" science.

TV Feature on Bourke and the BIG Season of 2010

ABC TV's Landline Programme ran a feature on "Bourke Battlers" on Sunday 30th May. It includes segments (some out of context) of an interview with me.     Here is the link.