Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for February 2007

An Inconvenient Oscar

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The documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, in which former Vice President Al Gore explains the current “climate crisis” and how Australia must sign the Kyoto Protocol to stop global warming, last night won an Oscar Award for best documentary film.

The Oscars are awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and considered the most presitigous and most watched film awards ceremony in the world.

The director of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Davis Guggenheim, took the film’s star Al Gore on stage to accept the award with Mr Gore declaring:

“My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis.

“It’s not a political issue, it’s a moral issue.

“We have everything we need to get started with the possible will to act. That’s a renewable resource. Let’s renew it.”

Mr Guggenheim said he and the film crew were so inspired by Al Gore’s fight for 30 years to tell this truth on global warming.

I’m not sure that Al Gore was all that truthful in the film or that it is a moral issue. I wrote a column for the ABC radioCounterpoint program last year in which I suggested global warming was more a technological than a moral issue. There are related blog pieces here.

According to CBS News reporting on last night Oscar Award’s ceremony:

“Earlier in the evening Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio took the stage to unveil a series of efforts the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took to make this year’s awards more environmentally friendly…

“Oscar ballots were made from partially recycled paper and organic produce was served at the Governor’s Ball. The academy joined with the Natural Resources Defense Council to reduce energy usage and increase recycling.

“Other initiatives included rides for presenters and stars in hybrid vehicles. The academy said it had explored hydrogen-powered fuel cell buses to transport crew and other workers, but did not have enough time to do it this year.”

I’m surprised they didn’t just pay someone to plant a few trees to “off-set” the night.

The Language of Climate Change: A Note from Luke Walker

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Last night Australia’s “premier television current affairs program” Four Corners showed a documentary purportedly about the “campaign to deny the science of global warming”.

A regular reader and commentator at this blog, Luke Walker, emailed me the following comment on the program:

Hi Jennifer,

ABC Four Corners last night aired CBC’s news magazine show The Fifth Estate which panned Dr. S. Fred Singer, Dr Tim Ball, Exxon, APCO and others in the ” Denial Machine” a 40-minute documentary that gave context to anti-AGW politics in the USA and Canada.

Of particular interest was the careful use of language by media analysts and opinion pollsters. For example, a once Republican media strategist Frank Luntz dispassionately laid out how to use framing and language to create uncertainty from certainty and create public opinion on issues such as climate change.

Chomsky would have had a field day. We don’t say “global warming”, we say “climate change”. Global warming is too scary for the poll groups.

We were shown how words like “energy intensity” get seamlessly inserted into the rhetoric while having a different meaning and different outcomes to reductions in greenhouse emissions but the same public perceptions.

For Aussie audiences there was plenty of US style journalism and ‘Denial Machine’ had plenty of not-so-nice evidence, told-you-so’s and tut-tut’s for the AGW converted.

Indeed the AGW cheer squad would have loved it.

But in the end the issue of global warming/climate change has become a right versus left issue. Good versus evil, or evil versus good. The end of the world versus the end of the economy. Conservatives versus liberals. Dirty denialists versus scary alarmists.

Bizarrely the show’s last word was from the once Republican media strategist Frank Luntz who has incredibly become a convert to AGW. He now believes that the science is conclusive and that we must do something about it.

“Conservatives need to make much greater effort to talk about what’s happening in the environment, and Liberals should acknowledge the serious economic consequences of Kyoto,” Luntz said. He continued, “If you really care about global warming, take it out of the political sphere, don’t beat each other over the head, be honest, don’t yell, and focus on solutions that make a difference. Not everything in life is about politics”.

Global warming is too important an issue to be run by public relations, language manipulators and partisan politics.

Take note say the converted – and so – a very long road to travel, including for the inhabitants of this blog.

Cheers, Luke.

Licola Flood: A Note from Ralph Barraclough

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Late last year there were terrible bushfires across north eastern Victoria. Max Rheese sent us a note suggesting there was a need for more prescribed burning.

Now there is isolated flooding.

Following is a note and some photographs from Ralph Barraclough a landholder and a fire brigade captain with land adjacent and surrounded by the Alpine National Park (pdf file). The National Park contains many nationally significant species including the Bogong Daisy-bush, Mountain Pygmy Possum, Broad-toothed Rat and Alpine Water Skink. Large areas of the park burnt in 2003 and again in December last year.

Greetings,

Well after saving nearly everything when we were burnt out at Licola on December 14 last year, we are now being flooded out.

The damage here is so bad my house would not have a hope in hell of surviving a similar flood again. The debris is nearly as high as the spoutings and the previous biggest flood hight never even got to the footings after 36mm of rain in 20 minutes. This flood was from 28mm in 45 minutes.

Licola_Target Ck 6pm Fri23Feb07 compressed.JPG
Target Creek, Friday night 6pm

The first the locals knew I was in trouble was when 3km away at Licola they saw my worldly posesions floating down the local river. They are collecting my equipment 50km downstream. I live on a small creek that is a tributory.

The flood through my house was so intense it washed a Land Rover engine block out of my shed into the garden. The floor boards came up from the water underneath and tipped over all the stuff I had stored on chaires and stools to try and be above the flood waters. Industrial sewing machines were washed down along the creek.

I nearley drowned trying to get a Land Rover out of a shed when a tidel wave pushed me back in. There was so much debris floating around I had great difficulty remaining upright.

I am expecting more floods like this and this is nowhere like the worst case scenario. The country is just so burnt there is nothing to slow the water from getting into streams. Things are so bad here I will be salvaging as much as possible from my house and taking it to higher ground than Noah would consider drowning. Last week flooding wrecked a building site replacing a lost house from the fire. The new house suffered serious structural damege, a site hut was utterly flattened and a caravan ended up on a meter of debris.

Licola itself was also flooded out. The shop had water through it, all up 2 houses and the living area of the shop may have to be rebuilt. We have had tremendous help from the SES, Police and Wellington Shire and some of the local dear hunters. The CFA has offered very welcome support.

My files from the last 9 years of trying to https://cialico.com stop these things from happening were all removed from the house only hours before the flood and survive.

Regards,
Ralph Barraclough
Lincola, Victoria

LicolaFlood_Target Ck 10am Sat24Feb07 compressed.JPG
Target Creek, Saturday morning 10am

Licola Jamieson Rd Sat24Feb07 AM compressed.JPG
Jamieson Road, Saturday morning

Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future: A New Book

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There was a book review in The New York Times last week by Cornelia Dean which began:

“When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.

Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach…

Read the complete article entitled ‘The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies’
here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/science/20book.html?_r=3&ref=science&a&oref=slogin

You can buy the book entitled ‘Useless Arithemetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future’ at Amazon.com

GM Chickens for Therapeutic Drugs: A Note from Paul Williams

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Hi Jennifer,

There has been quite a lot of discussion about Genetically Modified (GM) organisms related to vegetable products, but I wonder if readers are aware that GM, or transgenic animals are also a subject of study.

Here is a link to an article that describes the production of transgenic hens which can produce eggs containing therapeutic protein based drugs:

“We describe the generation of transgenic chickens that synthesize functional recombinant therapeutic protein specifically in the oviduct of laying hens as a component of egg white.”

Translation: How we bred GM chickens that produce eggs containing therapeutic drugs.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1783527

I wonder if people who oppose GM crops also oppose this type of research?

Regards,
Paul Williams
Mt Baker, South Australia

Whaling Mother Ship Being Repaired: A Note from Glenn Inwood

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I emailed Glenn Inwood yesterday. He is a spokesman for the Japanese whalers in the Antarctic whose mother ship the Nisshin Maru had to be evacuated last week after a fire broke out.

Greenpeace has been concerned the stricken ship could end up an ecological disaster with 1.3 million litres of fuel potentially leaking into the ocean.

I asked Mr Inwood for an update on the situation and he emailed me this morning:

Dear Jennifer,

Over the week, the crew first dealt with electrical and mechanical checks, replacing wiring that was burnt out, getting the engines going. The engines are apparently in good shape, able to function and ready to go.

After that, they looked at navigational and safety aspects of the vessel, such as checking the two radars, rudder control, autopilot navigation, etcetera.

As of yesterday, I understand they were unfreezing pipes, getting the desalinator going, getting freshwater back into the system, and cleaning out living quarters that were flooded from fighting the fire.

We have benefited from excellently calm Antarctic weather. As we have assured media, if conditions deteriorate and the vessel needs to be moved from where she is, then of course that will be done. While they were repairing engine, etcetera, they also hooked up a tow just in case it was required.

The crew has worked day and night tirelessly to get the vessel ready for sailing. It’s been a very trying time for them. Not only have they lost a colleague, they are receiving those reports from Greenpeace and Chris Carter and that’s making it more difficult for them. I hope to have good news for you soon.

Best regards,
Glenn Inwood

According to Radio New Zealand the ship was moving under its own power this afternoon taking a short test run.