Bushfires and Climate Change

[Cutter]

There was a fair bit on here during and after the Victorian fires. The link between climate change and bushfires has been argued before but when the firies are saying it and talking about their experience it carries a fair bit of weight. Meanwhile, our politicians try to score points before they pass a lamentably compromised CPRS.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aKC9GCP4BkyE

Australian Firefighters Urge Passage of Climate Bill (Update2) Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A
By Ben Sharples

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Australian firefighters, spurred on by what they say are record temperatures contributing to “catastrophic code red” fire-danger warning, urged lawmakers to pass climate change legislation under debate by Senators.

Politicians threatening to block or weaken the proposed carbon reduction scheme are putting lives and properties at risk, Peter Marshall, national secretary of the United Firefighters Union, said in a statement today. The body represents 13,500 professional firefighters.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants a vote on the legislation by the end of next week, when parliament’s final sitting for the year concludes. Australia’s upper house of parliament is debating the draft carbon-reduction laws for a second time after the bill was approved this week by the House of Representatives, where the ruling Labor Party holds a majority.

“The science has become increasingly clear that we face an exponential increase in bushfire risks with growing temperatures,” John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute, an independent research organization, said by phone from Sydney today.

A warning of potentially catastrophic bushfires, the highest fire danger alert, has been issued for the third day in parts of South Australia, Bob Schahinger, climate services technical officer for the Bureau of Meteorology, said by phone.

Records Broken

“There have been a lot of temperature records broken this month,” Schahinger said today. “It’s abnormal for November, but not particularly abnormal for South Australia during summer.” Australia’s summer officially starts Dec. 1.

Adelaide, the state capital, experienced its first spring heat wave after recording 8 consecutive days in excess of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), the bureau said this week. Temperatures in the city exceeded 42 degrees today and similar levels were forecast for parts of Victoria state.

A bushfire is burning out of control on the Yorke Peninsula, a rural area west of Adelaide, according to the Country Fire Service. Residents were advised to activate their bushfire survival plans and told that leaving the area may be their safest option.

A second fire was burning out of control near Streaky Bay on the state’s west, south of Ceduna, an area at risk of “catastrophic” fire conditions, the Country Fire Service said. People in the area should take shelter and not attempt to leave as the roads “will not be safe,” the service said in an alert.

Warmest Years

Negotiations on proposed amendments to the Rudd government’s carbon legislation are continuing, opposition climate spokesman Ian Macfarlane, said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. today. “My goal is to finish this on Sunday, or certainly no later than Monday,” he said.

The majority of opposition Liberal Party representatives don’t accept that human beings are the cause of global warming, Liberal Senate Leader Nick Minchin said on ABC television on Nov. 9. Scientific evidence on climate change is increasingly discredited, Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said in the same television program.

Australia’s draft climate change laws would introduce carbon trading in 2011, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by between 5 percent and 15 percent from their 2000 levels within 10 years. Senators defeated the proposed laws on Aug. 13, and a second rejection would give Rudd a trigger to call an early election.

“At its very core, climate change is about rising global temperatures,” Rudd told Parliament in Canberra today. “Australia has experienced warmer-than-average annual temperatures for 17 of the last 19 years,” he said. Thirteen of the 14 warmest years in the country’s history occurred between 1995 and 2008.

‘Fires of Climate Change’

Bushfires swept through Victoria state on Feb. 7, a disaster known as “Black Saturday,” killing 173 people and razing 450,000 hectares (1.1 million acres) of land as temperatures soared to as high as 48 degrees Celsius. Fanned by winds as strong as 125 kilometers (78 miles) an hour, the fires gutted more than 2,000 homes.

“Some of the unprecedented fire conditions that have been experienced and the experience on Black Saturday are the fires of climate change,” the Climate Institute’s Connor said. “These are messages for the urgency of climate action.”

The Australian government’s cap and trade emissions system proposes a A$10 a metric ton carbon price lasting a year until July 2012, from when the market will start determining the cost of releasing CO2, blamed for causing global warming, into the atmosphere.

The climate laws as proposed would be “catastrophic” for the economy of Victoria, TRUenergy Holdings Ltd. said in a statement today. The legislation would “bring down” its electricity industry, the power retailer, which provides gas and electricity to over 1.3 million customers in Australia, said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Sharples in Canberra at bsharples@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 19, 2009 02:46 EST

 

[Pfitzy]

Well.... the fact is we've had very very bad fires before. People have short memories - just because more people were killed this time doesn't make the fires necessarily worse. Maybe its just that the people were smarter previously and knew when to GTF out.

Also, people have short memories about weather. We had a drought like the recent one back in the early 80s - I was living on a farm in NW NSW when it happened and I can tell you it was no fun. Now I see people in Sydney saying "Wow what about those high winds we had last month? I've never seen that before" which is patently untrue. Just that people in the city tend to pay less attention to weather patterns because it doesn't affect their livelihood like it does rural centres.

I'm not a climate change skeptic. I believe that we're doing a lot of harm to the environment the way we're carrying on as a species. But its a bigger concern that we're running out of resources and that, more than anything, will prompt us to find answers to the energy crisis.

My money is on geothermal and hot-rock technology.

 

[Cutter]

Nick my family has been on the land since the late 19th century. The only prolonged dry spell like this was the 30s and 40s. The eighties was nothing in comparison.

November temperature records are being broken left right and centre. Its a prolonged dry spell and weather patterns are changing (ie drier in South Eastern Australia, more rain in Northern NSW). Something's happening.

The morons in government talking about a population of over 35million are mad.

 

[Pfitzy]

Nick my family has been on the land since the late 19th century. The only prolonged dry spell like this was the 30s and 40s. The eighties was nothing in comparison.

Where? My Dad's side have farmed in South Australia since the mid-1800s and prolonged dry periods is what you plan for - they have something akin to a 7-year cycle there with a bumper year followed by a couple of average ones and then 3-4 years of very lean trot. Dad moved our family near the Moree district and the drought nobbled farmers and graziers alike. Cotton farmers funnily enough owned rivers so they didn't have an issue.

There is always a tendency for recent memory to override everything else. This is a drought, of that there is no doubt. But droughts happen - blame El Nino or La Nina whatever.

 

[Cutter]

South west slopes. It sounds like very regular weather patterns in SA with the 7 year cycle. We've seen (which is replicated elsewhere in the Murray Darling basin) a very wet period between the late 40s and the mid 90s. Prior to that there was a drier period. We are either entering another dry very phase or are suffering from the effects of climate change or we are being hit by both.

Evidence that this isn't like other droughts of recent memory is the capacity of the dams along most of the rivers in NSW, trucking water to the likes of Condobolin and farmers walking away from fruit trees and grape vines that are 10, 20 and up to 50 or 60 years old.

 

[PaarlBok]

Nick my family has been on the land since the late 19th century. The only prolonged dry spell like this was the 30s and 40s. The eighties was nothing in comparison.

Where? My Dad's side have farmed in South Australia since the mid-1800s and prolonged dry periods is what you plan for - they have something akin to a 7-year cycle there with a bumper year followed by a couple of average ones and then 3-4 years of very lean trot. Dad moved our family near the Moree district and the drought nobbled farmers and graziers alike. Cotton farmers funnily enough owned rivers so they didn't have an issue.

There is always a tendency for recent memory to override everything else. This is a drought, of that there is no doubt. But droughts happen - blame El Nino or La Nina whatever.

Hell two more Boere here.

This Climate Change is serious business. All of us have a role to play to protect mother Earth. Myself love the outdoors and gardening. Thats where you'll find me saturday mornings if I am not walking the line.

You only have to go back to your roots or where you live 10 years ago and look at the way the nature went backwards. It happen in a breathtaking rate and if things going the way it do nowadays , it wont be long before we have to eat flippen grasshoppers and snakes like the Chinamen. They sure fuck our nature and sealife up 120km/h.

 

[cyclopath]

South west slopes. It sounds like very regular weather patterns in SA with the 7 year cycle. We've seen (which is replicated elsewhere in the Murray Darling basin) a very wet period between the late 40s and the mid 90s. Prior to that there was a drier period. We are either entering another dry very phase or are suffering from the effects of climate change or we are being hit by both.

Evidence that this isn't like other droughts of recent memory is the capacity of the dams along most of the rivers in NSW, trucking water to the likes of Condobolin and farmers walking away from fruit trees and grape vines that are 10, 20 and up to 50 or 60 years old.

My father in law (central west NSW) would echo this. He always says how his old man would repeat that the period from the 40s onwards (he died in the 70s) was a run of exceptionally good years rather than the norm, and that his experience prior to that, and from his father's experience was of a drier period. My father in law expected this type of run, just didn't know when it would start. He has always been pretty adaptable with his land accordingly.
There is no doubt that area is consistently drier than I recall going back to the mid 70s when my grandfather used to farm there too.

 

[Cutter]

Re: Climate Change etc

There are some interesting articles in todays' smh about abandoned farms in western NSW. There is also this article about Dubai. It may not belong here but its worth a read.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/socie...y-facade-was-first-to-fold-20091204-kaue.html

A subprime parable, or why Dubai's glitzy facade was first to fold
JONATHAN FREEDLAND
December 5, 2009

When future generations sit their children down to tell the story of the great crash of the early 21st century, they will surely begin with the parable of a place called Dubai. As the decades pass and the details become hazy, it will sound like a Bible story or one of Aesop's fables. ''This, children, is the tale of a desert king who yearned to rule the most luxurious kingdom in the world. He wanted the tallest building on the planet and hotels of an opulence beyond imagination. Gold and silver tumbled from the sky, until the sands were covered with the fastest cars, champagne flowed all night and people dined on gold-dipped, foie gras fragranced, lobster-infused maki rolls - each one costing $180.

''Even nature itself could not stand in the way. Where there were no beaches, the sheikh ordered that beaches be made, crafting them so that when the gods looked down from the heavens, they would see the shape of a palm tree or a map of the world.

''He spent so much money, so fast, it was impossible to keep up. There was only one problem. The money was all borrowed. And one day, it began to slide back into the sand …''

Perhaps it won't end exactly that way but the story is bound to have staying power. For Dubai is a perfect metaphor for the crisis crippling global capitalism. The dream of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the autocrat who rules Dubai, was unsustainable in every sense: economically, morally and environmentally. But there is no room for First World condescension here, wagging a finger as we tell the Arabs they were deluded to think they could build a financial centre to match the Western citadels of London, New York and Frankfurt. We cannot condescend to Dubai because its flaws are ours - even if they are lit in outlandishly vivid colours.

That's why the money men are already asking themselves who will be next: some worry about the fate of Greece, while others fret for Latvia, Hungary and even Ireland. They all made Dubai's mistake, if not quite at the same pace. They pulled out the credit card and went on a spending binge - and now the bill has fallen due. But it wasn't just them: we've all been at it. Japan is on course to have a public debt twice the size of its gross domestic product next year, while the US debt is set nearly to equal the country's economic output. Britain is not far behind, with a debt forecast at 89 per cent of its GDP. We've all been living on tick.

In this sense, the sheikh who wanted the Burj al-Arab to be the world's only seven-star hotel is not that different from the Florida couple who moved out of the trailer park and into a condo. They both bought something they couldn't afford, with money that wasn't theirs. Dubai was simply a subprime statelet in a subprime world.

Of course it was economically unsustainable but the difference between us and them is one of degree rather than kind. Their boom was fuelled by rising property prices that nobody thought would ever fall, and by cheap money that kept flowing through the tap marked ''low interest rates''. That sounds familiar, not only as a description of our recent past. It fits our present, too. Today's regime of near-zero interest rates means that we're trying to get ourselves out of the current hole by the very means that got us into it: spending cash that was borrowed on the cheap.

Britain has more reason than most to avoid smugness in its view of Dubai. The great criticism of the emirate that sought to be a magnet for finance and tourism is that it was built on nothing. There was no real economy; Dubai didn't actually make anything. Can a post-industrial Britain, for example, reliant on the City and on service industries, really say it is so different? The truth is, it does not make much either.

Nevertheless, something else sticks in the craw about Dubai. It's that the eye-popping luxury was built on the sweat of foreign workers, toiling in a form of modern bondage. More than a million men and women from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and across Asia have turned Dubai from a sleepy village of pearl-divers and fishermen into a shimmering Arabian Las Vegas - and have been rewarded with next to no rights and meagre pay. They sleep in labour camps, each one crammed with 3000 or more people. In the strict hierarchy of the emirate, their role is to serve the expatriates and wealthy natives. It is all but a slave society.

We are right to find that morally repugnant. But we should beware the mote in our own eye. For if the West enjoyed economic boom times for the 15 years that preceded 2008, it did so thanks to low inflation. How did inflation stay so low? Because labour costs were kept down, thanks to millions of Chinese workers prepared to sweat for wages we would consider close to slavery. So, yes, we can be repelled by those women buying Hermes bags and Manolo Blahniks by the crateload in the Dubai shopping malls. But they weren't that different from the Westerners snapping up the bargains at discount retailers. Both groups rely on the fact that, far away and out of sight, somebody is prepared to work very hard for very little money.

Environmentally, Dubai makes the jaw drop. The air-conditioners blowing full blast into the open air, to make the gardens cooler, the de rigueur four-wheel-drives and the indoor ski resort, where sub-zero temperatures are maintained even in the middle of a baking desert - no wonder the UAE ranks second in the global league table of per capita carbon emissions (beaten only by its Gulf neighbour, Qatar).

But our own consumption of fossil fuels hardly makes us blameless. In this, as in so much else, Dubai is just like us - only more so.

Still, the universality of the Dubai parable shouldn't obscure an equally important part of the story. Despite the sheikh's best efforts to pretend otherwise, Dubai isn't some wonderland that could have existed anywhere. It is part of the Persian Gulf - and utterly revealing of that region's ugliest face.

For Dubai, as with the rest of the emirates and the other Gulf states, did not use its enormous wealth to develop its own people, let alone the peoples of the wider Arab region. Instead, as Durham University's Christopher Davidson, of Durham University', puts it, ''they just imported what they needed ready-made''.

So the Gulf states buy in the architects and the chefs to present the glitzy front of a Westernised society, skipping the awkward intermediate stage of nurturing the talents of their own people.

There is another route open, one that would dream not of hotels shaped like sails and fake archipelagos, but of a region packed with universities and seats of learning to rival the great scholarship of the Islamic golden age. Imagine a Gulf region that might serve as an inspiration for the whole Arab world, rather than a playground for its richest kids. There could be a fable in that, too.

Guardian News & Media

 

[Pfitzy]

OK, so its been a week since I took my trip around the state. The route:

Putty Road to Muswellbrook; New England Hwy to Glen Innes; Gwydir Hwy across to Gravesend; various back roads to Bellata; Newell Hwy down to Coonabarabran; various back roads to Mendooran then on to Dubbo; Newell to Wyalong and then off down to Wagga; Hume back to Sydney.

I'm here to tell you its not the worst I've seen it. Some places looked to be suffering, but in about 20 years living out there or travelling through various parts of it, nothing I saw gave me pause to suspect this is the climate change drought everyone is making it out to be. Its not a great period, but I still reckon the drought of the early 80s was worse.

Up through Putty is just scrub anyway but the grazing land we saw was in good shape and there was healthy undergrowth (now a fire hazard of course). Further north into the upper Hunter there was little lack of feed for the stock and while there was a yellow tinge about the place, this is typical of the time of year.

Getting up into the tablelands of the New England, it is true that places like Murrundi look a bit dry, but then their typical rainfall usually makes them brighter than the emerald city anyway, so a bit of yellow grass is nothing unusual. Importantly, the subsurface water still appears to be good, judging by the depressions and creek beds holding a suitable amount of green growth, and the trees being in reasonable shape.

Tamworth has definitely seen worse, though it was hot when we went through there. From the top of the Moonbi range all the way through to Glen Innes looks in great shape - in fact for summer time I've rarely seen it better. Heading west to Inverell, the grain crops look thick enough to walk across, and I'd be surprised if its not a bumper year.

I visited a little place called Warialda, where I went to high school, and there are signs that people think its bad - I saw bores being used for municipal water where previously they didn't exist. The creek that runs through town had largely gone under the sandy bed, and one of the local waterholes was lower than I'd ever seen it. But again, cropping and grazing was still in good shape, and as I paused to visit the old farm - which has definitely seen harder days - the current tenants said that it was just a lack of the big soaking rains that were the problem. Regular rain wasn't an issue.

Heading southwest to hook up to the Newell, it was scrub broken up by fields of healthy or recently harvested grain crop (mostly wheat by the looks) and a few creeks I saw were definitely bone dry. Again, this has happened before and will happen again. There was enough moisture available for the soil to produce solid/strong cropping with none of the bare corners or thinned out edges that you'd expect in a poor year.

Going south on the Newell to Narrabri the abundant farming continued - this looks to be a decent year if you're a grain farmer in the northwest of the state. Its worth mentioning at this point that the mate who accompanied me grew up in Sydney and then the coast around Nowra, so he'd never see proper flat land before

The Pilliga scrub between Narrabri and Coonabarabran looks as it always does: scrubby

We cut through to Mendooran to get to Dubbo (its better than following trucks up and down the foothills of the Warrumbungles) and before a little run-in with the law (and 4 points thanks) we again saw fairly healthy country. Not glowing green but enough to suggest there was going to be a good year. South of Mendooran is a long stretch of state forest and there were glimpses of greenery in amongst the trees, which is good sign given the sandy soil doesn't hold a lot of water at the best of times.

The stretch from Dubbo through to Parkes, Forbes, and Wyalong is never usually much to comment on. To coastal or city people it looks like a wasteland most of the time, and occasionally breaks out into something you would considering mowing. But again, the crops and grazing looked to be in largely healthy state, and the green edge on either side of the road indicated things aren't too shabby. Forbes in particular had its lagoon as full as I've seen it, From Wyalong down to Wagga it looked like recent rain had taken hold judging by the pools of it on the side of the road. Temora's lake has people were water skiing!

If you drew a 60km arc around Moree, I'd definitely say that was the driest part of the trip. But there wasn't one town we went through that had dried out sporting ovals, or was letting the tees or greens on its golf course yellow off in any way, or closing its pool because they don't have the water. Sure, some towns appeared to be a bit smarter about bore water and using filtering techniques to clean it, but that's par for the course when people expect to play cricket on a green turf wicket instead of the old concrete slab we had as kids, with a dirt outfield. The rivers in some of the towns on the NW slopes and plains looked quite low, but they still had a lot of subsurface moisture which indicated rains had come, just not in the steady quantities they historically have.

To me, it seems the time between the soaking rains is what is getting to people. In the 80s it was a complete lack of any kind of rain that really hurt, whereas now its just that the rain doesn't turn up for weeks on end. This has all happened before, and I'd say farmers in the areas I visited don't have too much to complain about.

On the topic of bushfires - as I mentioned above, we took the Pilliga Scrub which is one of the largest state forests west of the ranges. Isn't it funny how you barely ever hear about fires from there? Maybe its a lack of arsonists...

 

[Cutter]

Nick - very thorough email and quite an interesting trip. I actually really enjoy driving trips through country NSW. However, and without being disrespectful, I don't think your whistlestop tour of country NSW contains enough data for anyone to draw conclusions on climate change. You probably werent suggesting they should, but that is the impression I got from your post.

A better guide is that the river red gums in the Macquarie marshes and elsewhere along the Murray Darling system are dying because they need floods every so often to survive. These river red gums are hundreds of years old. To me, that's a better guide than deciding whether the grass on the side of the road means the country has seen worse times or not.

Incidentally, my family used own a property bordering the Pilliga. There are fires in the Pilliga but, you are right, they are started naturally (or by accident) rather than deliberately.

A good article on the so called "climate gate" here.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/socie...-war-swirls-around-swindle-20091209-kk69.html

Climate emails: a dirty war swirls around 'swindle'BEN CUBBY
December 10, 2009

This week I received an unsigned letter containing a black and white photograph of a figure hanging from a lamp post. On the back was written the word "Climategate".

The letter is one of many being sent to scientists, politicians and journalists as part of an unprecedented information war being waged around the science of climate change. Thankfully most are much more urbane.

''Climategate'' refers to the scandal in which a series of emails were stolen from the University of East Anglia and published as supposed proof that the science underpinning climate change action is based on fraud. A minority of people still believe the email affair is being hushed up by newspapers.

This conspiracy theory was dismissed with the contempt it merits by Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at the Copenhagen summit this week.

But the accusations of fraud will persist because the so-called ''debate'' on climate change has veered into the realms of fantasy. The fog on the public relations battlefield has obscured the real question: how to cut greenhouse gas emissions in a fast but sensible way.

The sum total of both the doom-laden warnings and the ever more hysterical claims from climate sceptics of a global conspiracy is an impenetrable wall of noise.

This is a pity, because the case for climate change action doesn't need spin. It doesn't need reference to ''alarmists'' or ''deniers''. Participants in the so-called debate around climate change need to grow up.

The wall of noise plays into the hands of the vested interests who want to see nothing done. It is used to frighten people whose jobs depend on digging coal or smelting steel.

It has helped deliver a political landscape in Australia, unique in the developed world, where the leader of a major party can now base its climate change policy on the belief that the world seems to be getting cooler.

This, in turn, has taken the pressure off the Government's own questionable climate change policy.

Climate science may be complicated, but it's not rocket science. It is in the public domain, open to informed scrutiny, and it has been there for decades. The self-styled climate sceptics movement - not a term climate scientists approve of - has had ample opportunity to debunk arguments which the world can no longer ignore.

We know that carbon dioxide, some other gases and water vapour trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere. We know this because it can be measured, and replicated in lab experiments. We know that the warming trends we have detected are closely correlated with the rising CO2 content. The computer models used to predict future climate change scenarios take these simple concepts and some other variables, such as solar activity, into account. The reason we know that these models work is that we can model past climate scenarios using the same criteria and match the results up against the existing temperature records. If your model starts with the conditions we know to have been present in the year 1900, and produces the conditions we know to have existed through the 20th century, it is a fair bet it works.

Even if climate models are discounted as evidence, direct observation of the natural world adds to an already compelling case.

We know that the ocean is struggling to absorb CO2 content because we can measure it, and measure its effects on marine life. We can measure the extent of decline in Arctic and Antarctic ice, rising sea levels and melting glaciers. We can measure changes in forests and deserts. We can measure these results against the level of warming that the CO2 content of the atmosphere leads us to expect, and they match.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded it is 90 per cent certain that the current cycle of climate change is being driven by human activity. It's fifth assessment report, discussed overnight in Copenhagen, will further bolster the evidence. Few scientific theories approach this level of certainty.

Opposing the mainstream scientific view means advancing the idea that there is a mysterious X-factor that mimics the warming effect we would expect to see from our greenhouse gas emissions. It is still a slim possibility, but not one delegates at Copenhagen are taking seriously. It would be a happy day if they are proved wrong, but no one would be advised to hold their breath for that.

 

[Pfitzy]

Nick - very thorough email and quite an interesting trip. I actually really enjoy driving trips through country NSW. However, and without being disrespectful, I don't think your whistlestop tour of country NSW contains enough data for anyone to draw conclusions on climate change. You probably werent suggesting they should, but that is the impression I got from your post.

Having not gone further west than the Newell, I wouldn't dream of passing judgement on the Far West, particularly the Darling river as I know for a fact it is in deep trouble - but that is NOT a product of climate change. It is a problem with farming practices further upstream.

I was pointing out, as you suggest, that the areas I've seen weren't at their worst, and getting back to my original point - I'm more concerned about our use of available resources for mere profit rather than longevity of the human race.

Go nuclear.

 

[Scarfman]

You mean nucular.

I disagree with whoever wrote "Climate science may be complicated, but it's not rocket science." It's an utterly ridiculous thing for someone to say when they are trying to introduce "informed scrutiny." Climate science is about 100 times more complicated than rocket science. Indeed, it may be too complicated for this generation's analytical tools.

I'm a climate "sceptic" in the sense that I believe that we are far from the standard of scientific proof that exists in other domains, such as determining pharmaceutical safety. However, I think there is enough evidence for us to take fairly strong action to improve the earth's environment.

 

[barbarian]

A better guide is that the river red gums in the Macquarie marshes and elsewhere along the Murray Darling system are dying because they need floods every so often to survive. These river red gums are hundreds of years old. To me, that's a better guide than deciding whether the grass on the side of the road means the country has seen worse times or not.

Isn't that because irrigators and developers are arse-raping both the Murray and the Darling?

 

[Cutter]

A better guide is that the river red gums in the Macquarie marshes and elsewhere along the Murray Darling system are dying because they need floods every so often to survive. These river red gums are hundreds of years old. To me, that's a better guide than deciding whether the grass on the side of the road means the country has seen worse times or not.

Isn't that because irrigators and developers are arse-raping both the Murray and the Darling?

There were still floods when there were irrigators. Now there are no longer floods (and certainly not as regularly) and there soon won't be irrigators. The irrigators arent getting any water and are slowly selling up or going broke. Cubby is a good example.

You are right though, irrigation doesn't help.

 

[mark_s]

I'm a climate "sceptic" in the sense that I believe that we are far from the standard of scientific proof that exists in other domains, such as determining pharmaceutical safety. However, I think there is enough evidence for us to take fairly strong action to improve the earth's environment.

Thats where I am at on this.

Further, I would rather take action and be proven to be wrong (but still improving the environment anyway) than sit back and hope.

 

[Cutter]

I'm a climate "sceptic" in the sense that I believe that we are far from the standard of scientific proof that exists in other domains, such as determining pharmaceutical safety. However, I think there is enough evidence for us to take fairly strong action to improve the earth's environment.

I can understand this point of view Scarfy. However, the scenarios are inverse.

1. We have a pharmaceutical product which, if we allow it, will be marketed by its producer as safe for humans to use and will be used by humans but we aren't certain it is safe. We have plenty of experience in getting to this stage and subsequently finding products are not safe. Should we allow the product to be released?

2. We are doing things to the environment that we are pretty sure, but not certain, are damaging it in a way which is causing climate change and consequential extreme weather events. We have no experience of this and any changes may be irreversible. This is having and will continue to have a particularly large impact on third world countries such as Bangladesh and on low lying Pacific islands. Should we take steps to prevent that from happening bearing in mind that the same steps will also improve other aspects of our life?

I imagine that from a pharmaceutical perspective, if there are no alternative drugs, and it is desperately needed for a specific treatement, they would be more likely to approve it prior to obtaining absolute certainty. From a climate perspective, there is no alternative treatment we are aware of and the likely consequences are catastrophic if we don't take action.

 

[Pfitzy]

Well, to take a counterpoint (not necessarily one I agree with) but we base our knowledge of the planet's history on what we find in sedimentary digs and proposed evidence that is yet to be refuted. Who is to say that human activity is responsible for ALL the changes? Maybe this is a yet-to-be-observed phenomenon that has occurred before but with such rapidity that it was unable to be identified in a single layer of dust under a mountain somewhere...

Besides which, pharmaceutical testing has never really been great since we stopped testing on animals....

 

[mark_s]

Well, to take a counterpoint (not necessarily one I agree with) but we base our knowledge of the planet's history on what we find in sedimentary digs and proposed evidence that is yet to be refuted. Who is to say that human activity is responsible for ALL the changes? Maybe this is a yet-to-be-observed phenomenon that has occurred before but with such rapidity that it was unable to be identified in a single layer of dust under a mountain somewhere...

Besides which, pharmaceutical testing has never really been great since we stopped testing on animals....

So all we need to do is find a few other earth like planets and start trialing the various approaches to climate change to see which works best. Problem solved. All in favour

 

[Pfitzy]

Aye

In the meantime, testing on animals should resume. All in favour?

 

[Aussie D]

I have tried to stay out of this Climate Change / ETS / CPRS debate but having spent the last couple of weeks in CHina thought I would weigh in with my 2c worth. As much as our politicians are 'supposedly' watching what China is doing are they actually looking?

Some of the technology over here is amazing, for example one of the cities have spent a couple $b rmb on converting all their street lights to LED lighting to save money and more importantly electricity. They have developed new magnetic technology for their wind generators that means the bearing that work on their wind power generators won't wear for the next 50 years (the wind generators themselves are horizontal not vertical like windmills - they are being used alongside freeways where the trucks driving past create enough wind to power the batteries by day to last all night).

Maybe in Australia we should be looking at investing in this type of technology and others around the world first before doing things that, if, as reported, have the capacity to destroy our coal industry (fear mongering I know but if their is any chance of it happening is it worth taking the risk?).