Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for September 2007

Australia’s Top Policeman: Climate Change ‘a Bigger Threat Than Terrorism’

By

Climate change ‘a bigger threat than terrorism’

CLIMATE change, not terrorism, will be the main security issue of the century, with potential to cause death and destruction on an unprecedented scale, Australia’s top policeman believes.

In a surprise foray into the politics of global warming, Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty described how climate refugees “in their millions” could create a national security emergency for Australia.

His provocative comments, made in a speech in Adelaide last night, are likely to be diplomatically sensitive after he described a scenario in which China was unable to feed its vast population.

Law enforcement agencies would struggle to cope with global warming’s “potential to wreak havoc, cause more deaths and pose national security issues like we’ve never seen before”, Mr Keelty said.

“It is anticipated the world will experience severe extremes in weather patterns, from rising global temperatures to rising sea levels,” he warned.

“We could see a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water. Crops could fail, disease could be rampant and flooding might be so frequent that people, en masse, would be on the move.

“Even if only some and not all of this occurs, climate change is going to be the security issue of the 21st century.”

Read more.

Greenpeace Rumbled

By

I rather liked this letter in yesterday’s UK Daily Mail, so I thought I would share it:

Red alert on Greenpeace

IS GREENPEACE more powerful than UK voters? Its lawyers are demanding a judicial review of the Government’s decision to recon­sider its attitude towards nuclear power.

Would that we could do the same about Greenpeace’s undemocratic decision to cover the world with useless and damaging windfarms, a course of action which almost all governments are following.

I know why we can’t: it would take too much money. How democratic is a democracy which allows rich lobby groups to influence its policy? Greenpeace seems to be awash with money: how much of it comes from the wind industry (i.e. taxpayers’ money)?

Greenpeace’s co-founder Patrick Moore was right: ‘They (Green­peace’ s new management) have become far more extreme, their politics little more than neo-­Marxism in green garb.’

As he points out, much of the environmental movement today tends to be strongly anti-human, anti-science, anti-business and anti-civilisation – as well as highly misleading. Greenpeace isn’t green and doesn’t want peace. It’s red and it wants power.

I don’t particularly care for nuclear power myself, but I don’t like an organisation that pretends to be green while destroying our natural surroundings for cialis its own gain – financial and political.

MARK DUCHAMP,

Pedreguer, Spain.

Criticism for AP Article ‘Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History’

By

The Associated Press article ‘Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History’ is criticised here.

The article begins:

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.
In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming—through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding—is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians—the Bushes’ Kennebunkport and John Edwards’ place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That’s the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is “the thing that I’m most concerned about as a scientist,” says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

“We’re going to get a meter and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. “It’s going to happen no matter what—the question is when.”

Sea level rise “has consequences about where people live and what they care about,” said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. “We’re going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost.”

Critics included John Christy:

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, stated that the AP mischaracterized his views on sea level in the article promoting climate fears a hundred years from now.

“[My] discussion [with the AP reporter Seth Borenstein] was primarily about the storm surges which come from hurricanes – that’s the real vulnerability. The sea level is rising around 1 inch per decade, but sea level is like any other climate parameter – its either rising or falling all the time. To me, 16 inches per century is not a significant problem to deal with. But since storm surges of 15 to 30 feet occur in 6 hours, any preventive strategy, like an extra 3 feet of elevation, would be helpful,” Christy wrote to the Inhofe EPW Press blog.

“Thinking that legislation can change sea level is hubris. I did a calculation on what 1000 new nuclear power plants operating by 2020 would do for the IPCC best guess in the year 2100. The answer is 1.4 cm – about half an inch (if you accept the IPCC projection A1B for the base case.) Also, there doesn’t seem to be any acceleration of the slow trend,” Christy explained.

US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Assessed

By

Science magazine 21st September:

Extracts from: Panel Gives U.S. Program Mixed Grades

An expert panel says the Bush Administration deserves “a pat on the back” for advancing the science of climate change. But the scientists assembled by the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) have serious concerns about the management, funding, and emphasis of the $1.7-billion-a-year Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). President George H. W. Bush created the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 1990 to bring under one umbrella the government’s efforts to understand climate change. In 2002, his son reshuffled the climate deck to create CCSP. Last week, the NRC panel took the first outside look at that program and concluded, says chair V. Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, that its efforts to understand how and why climate has changed and to make predictions are “proceeding well.”

Ramanathan says he’s troubled by the program’s limited success in “assessing [climate change] impacts on human well-being and adaptation capacities.” Those assessments would require reliable forecasts of climate change at the regional if not the local level, Ramanathan notes, a capability the world’s climate modelers are still struggling with. But gauging impacts on humans and figuring out how humans might adapt to climate change will take far more than the $20 million per year now spent within the program on social science studies, the committee said. It will also take better communication between the program and business interests, other agencies, and the general public. For starters, 21 synthesis and assessment reports were due from CCSP by now, but only two have been delivered.

Of Cattle and Conservation

By

…In another part of Australia, cattle grazing has been identified as detrimental to World Heritage values, by potentially initiating soil erosion, altering under-storey vegetation and fire regimes. Cattle grazing has also been associated with the introduction of weed species such as pasture crops and assisting in the spread of other weeds.

The Wet Tropics grazing policy is to phase out cattle grazing within the WHA as leases expire unless there is a demonstrated benefit for World Heritage management and no prudent and feasible alternatives are available. Some grazing is already being phased out under the State Forest transfer program.

Interestingly, cattle have historically played their part in establishing the conservation significance of Queensland’s Wet Tropics. In 1971, a couple of long-term Daintree rainforest residents returned home from a weekend in Mossman, to find four of their cattle dead. Suspecting foul play, they called in the Department of Primary Industry’s divisional veterinarian.

Ia2.jpg

Strychnine-like poisoning from alkaloids was found to have caused the deaths, from large, partially masticated seeds in the digestive systems of the cattle. Herbarium records revealed the re-discovery of a lost species of Calycanthus, but upon recognition of peculiarities and most significantly the variable expression of three or four cotyledons, the species became Idiospermum australiensis.

At the time, there were only eighteen families of primitive flowering plant known to exist world-wide; Idiospermaceae became the nineteenth family. Its discovery stimulated intense botanical interest in the rainforests of the Daintree, which in turn revealed a living museum of plants and animals of exceptional antiquity.

It is also interesting to note that from the early nineteen-hundreds until its re-discovery in seventy-one, the rainforest dinosaur Idiospermum australiensis was being selectively logged under its common name Ribbonwood. Axemen were familiar with special qualities of the plant, along with some seven hundred other species of rainforest cabinetwood timbers, as well as the complex rainforest habitats in which they grew.

Melbourne Benefits from Killing Barmah Brumbies

By

Public submissions in response to the Draft Feral Horse Management Plan for Barmah Forest close today.

The plan proposes the removal of horses from the Barmah Forest firstly by using lure and trap techniques over two years, which will commence following the approval of a final plan. The removal program would be reviewed annually and all feral horses are proposed to be removed from the Barmah Forest within five years of the program commencing. The involvement of key stakeholders will be through comment on this draft plan. The feral horse removal program will be managed jointly by the Department of Sustainability and Environment and Parks Victoria.

In a note from Angela Downey of the Great Divide Team:

Earlier this morning we received notification that the Victorian Government and their able assistants, not content with killing the Legend of the Man from Snowy River, by their banning of the Mountain Cattlemen and their Barmah counterparts, it seems now they are set to remove another icon of Victoria’s heritage under the guise of saving the environment and questionable animal humanity reasons.

On Monday members of Parks Victoria will set about removing 150 brumbies from the Barmah Forest which covers an area of 75,000 acres. It is claimed this small number of horses are causing severe damage over this huge area.

A decision was made to remove the animals from the park following this years harsh drought and with another to possibly to follow, with the implication that this small number of brumbies would place the environment and the resident native fauna under undue stress due to competition for feed and water. Many of the horses live in small family groups and are spread throughout the park. No doubt it has been a harsh year for them and many of the other animals.

However no mention has also been made of the contribution to the lack of feed made by other feral animals such rabbits, wild pigs, goats, foxes, dogs and cats all of which inhabit the forest. Such other feral animals often have massive explosive populations and cause direct and monumental damage to the environment.

An option of using helicopters with snipers on board to do the deed was considered but due to the potential of a similar outcry such as the furor over the Guy Fawkes National Park slaughter of 2000. During that episode many horses were shot but died a slow and agonising death from bullet wounds.

The Victorian National Parks propose to round up the Barmah brumbries, destroy any stressed and old animals on site and remove the rest to the abattoirs.

These animals would be obviously suffering due to the current dry conditions as would the native fauna. . They are more than happy to leave the suffering native fauna to their own devices in the Park while also making little impact on the removal of other feral fauna with populations of thousands which happily munch their way through tonnes of native flora and fauna, digging holes, slopping around in bogs, and bulldozing their way around the Park.

The removal of the Brumbies will have little impact on the environment of the Park. One has to question the governments motives in removing this small population of an Australian icon and part of our heritage.

If Parks Victoria are actually so concerned with the plight of the brumbies there are other options out there.

Further recommendations have been made by the Victorian Environment Assessment Council in its River Red Gum Forests Investigation Draft Proposals Paper (which states):

Domestic stock grazing has occurred in Barmah forest for several generations. The average of 2000 (summer) and 800 (winter) head of cattle agisted in the forest has been reduced in response to recent drought conditions, culminating in the destocking of the forest for the 2007 winter term. There are also 7 current grazing licences covering a total of 78 hectares and with a total carrying capacity of 112 Dry Sheep Equivalent that would be included in the proposed national park. Grazing with domestic stock is incompatible with national park status and will not be permitted in the proposed park. As well as domestic stock, Barmah forest is also grazed by feral horses and deer which, together with feral pigs, should also be promptly removed from the proposed national park to protect its highly significant natural values.

In Chapter 4 of the report, Social, economic and environmental implications, a candid expression of economic impact is made:

A team of consultants led by Gillespie Economics was commissioned by VEAC to independently assess the social and economic implications of VEAC’s proposed recommendations. The consultants concluded that the proposed recommendations would result in a net increase in economic value to Victoria of $92 million per year excluding the costs of environmental water. The breakeven price for environmental water would be between $1320 and $2880 per megalitre. Most of the benefits from the proposed recommendations result from non-use values for environmental protection, which are heavily dependent on adequate environmental water. These benefits would accrue mostly to people outside the Investigation area, especially in Melbourne, while the costs of the proposed recommendations would be largely borne within the Investigation area particularly in the areas near where public land timber harvesting and grazing are focussed. The towns of Cohuna, Koondrook, Nathalia and Picola are likely to be most sensitive to these effects, as they would be occurring in the context of the contraction of local economies and populations in these areas that has been experienced in recent years.

This is yet another abrogation of environmental responsibility in a seemingly endless succession, as defined within the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment 1992.

As people and communities are included in the definition of the environment, the threat of serious or irreversible socio-economic damage (as identified by the consultants) should bring the precautionary principle into play. Under the policy principle of intergenerational equity, the present generation should ensure that the health, diversity and productivity of the environment is maintained or enhanced for the benefit of future generations. And, environmental goals, having been established, should be pursued in the most cost effective way, by establishing incentive structures, including market mechanisms, which enable those best placed to maximise benefits and/or minimise costs to develop their own solutions and responses to environmental problems.