Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for March 2009

An Organised Crisis: Notes from Steven Hayward

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ONE of the persistent problems with environmentalism is its bait-and-switch character. The essentially political character of the movement cloaks itself with the seemingly objective authority of modern science, as though science were immune from politicization, or led to self-evident political or policy conclusions.

Laying aside the value-laden premises of the ways science is used and misused in environmental controversies, it is startling to discover how limited our scientific grasp of many environmental conditions really is. The worst abuse of science comes in the almost daily predictions of future environmental conditions based on sophisticated computer models that often lack a solid empirical grounding for their assumptions and are seldom validated or back-tested with any rigor…

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Plane found Under 90 metres of Ice

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AFTER about ninety minutes of flying through dense cloud cover, the coastal mountains appeared through an opening.  But where on the west coast were they … they were back on the east coast of Greenland…  fuel would only last another twenty minutes.    They landed on top of a remote ice cap in Greenland:  Eight planes including two B-17 bombers.  
 
That was on July 15, 1942. 
 
Fifty years later a small group of aviation enthusiasts decided to locate the squadron and recover one of the planes.  According to Svend Hendriksen, a resident of Greenland, what they found can help explain why Greenland’s glaciers have been melting so rapidly.  He wrote: 

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Asbestos and Rebuilding After the Victorian Bushfires

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IN the aftermath of the terrible Victorian bushfires, with more than 200 dead, there has been a lot of recrimination particularly over the issue of control burning – or lack of. Others blame a combination of drought and unprecedented weather conditions – some have even blamed global warming.

There are new building guidelines following claims that many houses were simply not built to appropriate standards. In all of this discussion I have seen no mention of the word “asbestos” – and I don’t mean in the context of disease, but rather in the context of a fire retardant.

Yes, some types of asbestos represent a genuine danger to workers at certain exposure levels and under certain conditions, but there was never any doubt that the material was an effective fire retardant.

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Oil Washes Ashore

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Up to 100,000 litres of oil leaked into Moreton Bay after the Pacific Adventurer cargo ship was holed on Wednesday morning, and the slicks are now blanketing 60 kilometres of Queensland’s coastline.  Read more here.

South Australia’s Water Woes Include Much Politics

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I have it on good advice, from the cabbie who drove me to the airport in Canberra recently, that South Australian senator Nick Xenophon is the most powerful politician in Australia. 

Mr Xenophon is certainly demanding the attention of the most powerful politician officially, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, by insisting on more water for South Australia in return for the passage of the economic stimulus package.

Now he is backing a possible constitutional challenge by South Australia to remove barriers to water trade in Victoria. 

By backing this legal action, he will in effect be supporting the federal bureaucracy against the states – presumably only because he believes it is the federal government that will act in the interests of South Australia. 

Given its continual dominance of the national water agenda, it is probably a safe bet.  

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No! More Killer Whales!

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Scientists fear melting sea ice could one day make killer whales the Hudson Bay’s top predator, a startling ecosystem shift and a blow for Inuit populations already reeling from dwindling polar bear numbers.  Read more here.