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.
18 December, 2010
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?"
30 November, 2010
Murray Darling Basin Plan
Letter Published in "The Land" of 25h November,2010
I think we can all agree with Tony Windsor (Letters, 18th November) that "we have a problem". But, I'm not sure we would agree on what the problem actually is. As I and many others see it, the problem is the dominance of dark green ideology, and classifying the natural results of an extreme dry period (and mis-management of the Lower Lakes), as river ill-health. First, let's scientifically examine the symptoms one by one and see if the rivers really are "unhealthy" or simply water deprived. Second, let us examine the hard numbers, (not the loose meaningless averages thrown around by the MDBA), for run-off, river flows and extractions, to determine whether these low river flows are really the result of excessive extractions.
The MDBA quote the annual average surface water extraction limit at 13,700 GL. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the total extractions for the last three years all added together are only 11,092 GL and for 2008/09 alone, only 3,492 GL. The seasonal allocation system would appear to be working well!
Tony Windsor is in a wonderful position to help get some truth and common sense into the debate. There is no better place to start than correctly defining the problem.
David Boyd
I think we can all agree with Tony Windsor (Letters, 18th November) that "we have a problem". But, I'm not sure we would agree on what the problem actually is. As I and many others see it, the problem is the dominance of dark green ideology, and classifying the natural results of an extreme dry period (and mis-management of the Lower Lakes), as river ill-health. First, let's scientifically examine the symptoms one by one and see if the rivers really are "unhealthy" or simply water deprived. Second, let us examine the hard numbers, (not the loose meaningless averages thrown around by the MDBA), for run-off, river flows and extractions, to determine whether these low river flows are really the result of excessive extractions.
The MDBA quote the annual average surface water extraction limit at 13,700 GL. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the total extractions for the last three years all added together are only 11,092 GL and for 2008/09 alone, only 3,492 GL. The seasonal allocation system would appear to be working well!
Tony Windsor is in a wonderful position to help get some truth and common sense into the debate. There is no better place to start than correctly defining the problem.
David Boyd
08 November, 2010
Murray Darling Basin Plan
In my view the key characteristic of inland Australia is its massive rainfall variability. It really is a nonsense to talk about averages for flows, extractions etc. when there is such a huge spread around the average. According to the ABS, actual total extractions in the whole Basin were 3,142GL in 07/08 and 3,492GL in 08/09. In other words about the same as the 3/4000 GL they want to claw back! These figures compare with the average surface extractions of 13,700GL which they keep talking about.
The three conclusions I take from this are 1) We should be focusing on the highly variable Allocations not Licenses/Entitlements. 2)The seasonal allocation methodolgy seems to be working well-bugger all water/bugger all allocations. 3) It is a nonsense to talk in terms of absolute numbers in something which has such massive variability.
The three conclusions I take from this are 1) We should be focusing on the highly variable Allocations not Licenses/Entitlements. 2)The seasonal allocation methodolgy seems to be working well-bugger all water/bugger all allocations. 3) It is a nonsense to talk in terms of absolute numbers in something which has such massive variability.
27 October, 2010
Murray Darling Basin
There is a very widely held view that we need to "restore the health of our rivers". This statement assumes that they are unhealthy, which might well be the case. However, we have just been through nearly a decade of the lowest rainfall/run-off that has ever been recorded.
Whilst this is extreme, under natural conditions it was not unusual for Australia to have very dry periods and for all of our inland rivers to periodically stop flowing altogether. So we need to be careful that the results of natural dryness are not being branded as "unhealthy". Likewise given this enormous natural variability we need to define just what we actually mean by the term "sustainability". The question asked of CSIRO to determine the "Sustainable Diversion Limits" of our rivers, seems to me to be a question which fails to recognise this variability. If "sustainable"in this sense means "annual" then the answer for even the Murray must be "nil"! We need to be very careful of using average statistics when the spread around the average is so enormous.
I believe we need to closely examine the "unhealthy" notion. What are the specific factors that indicate this apparent lack of health-acid sulphate soils, salinity, blue green algae, river red gum depletion, fish stock depletion, the ravages of carp- seem to me to be the main claims. We need to examine the truth and cause of each of these compared with natural conditions, before we leap to the conclusion that we need to extract less water. Particularly since extractions have been minimal in recent years. Perhaps throwing more water at the issue is not the solution?
Whilst this is extreme, under natural conditions it was not unusual for Australia to have very dry periods and for all of our inland rivers to periodically stop flowing altogether. So we need to be careful that the results of natural dryness are not being branded as "unhealthy". Likewise given this enormous natural variability we need to define just what we actually mean by the term "sustainability". The question asked of CSIRO to determine the "Sustainable Diversion Limits" of our rivers, seems to me to be a question which fails to recognise this variability. If "sustainable"in this sense means "annual" then the answer for even the Murray must be "nil"! We need to be very careful of using average statistics when the spread around the average is so enormous.
I believe we need to closely examine the "unhealthy" notion. What are the specific factors that indicate this apparent lack of health-acid sulphate soils, salinity, blue green algae, river red gum depletion, fish stock depletion, the ravages of carp- seem to me to be the main claims. We need to examine the truth and cause of each of these compared with natural conditions, before we leap to the conclusion that we need to extract less water. Particularly since extractions have been minimal in recent years. Perhaps throwing more water at the issue is not the solution?
26 October, 2010
Water
Letter sent to The Australian 24th October,2010
Your lead story-After the dry,here comes the overflow,Weekend Australian 23rd October-accurately reflects the joy of again having good flows into the Macquarie Marshes. Unfortunately the joy is spoilt by politically correct references to "government water buybacks" and an emphasis on conflict between irrigators and "marsh graziers". The reality is that over the last ten years both irrigators and graziers have both suffered as an all powerful Nature has failed to provide water for either. Now that same Nature has provided generously for both. Why are we humans so reluctant to attribute the extremes of our rainfall to factors beyond our control?
David Boyd
Your lead story-After the dry,here comes the overflow,Weekend Australian 23rd October-accurately reflects the joy of again having good flows into the Macquarie Marshes. Unfortunately the joy is spoilt by politically correct references to "government water buybacks" and an emphasis on conflict between irrigators and "marsh graziers". The reality is that over the last ten years both irrigators and graziers have both suffered as an all powerful Nature has failed to provide water for either. Now that same Nature has provided generously for both. Why are we humans so reluctant to attribute the extremes of our rainfall to factors beyond our control?
David Boyd
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)