Archives for May 6, 2011

“AN outcome from the anthropogenic global warming alarmism has been the implementation of government policies that can only reduce community resilience to the natural hazards of climate. The enormous research expenditure directed toward computer modelling and potential impacts has been at the expense of better understanding of the climate system and improved early warning of known hazardous events. None of the expenditure on climate change research over the past three decades has improved our ability to better understand and predict the onset and duration of drought, of tropical cyclones, conditions conducive to fire, or the extent of flooding. Yet each of these has been experienced across parts of Australia over the past 12 months, with significant loss of life, enormous private and public infrastructure destruction, and diminution of productivity.

“Proposed Government actions to make energy more expensive, or raise barriers that deny community access to existing energy forms, will further reduce community resilience to the hazards of climate. Today’s broad-acre farming is an outcome of mechanised production and transport based on fossil fuels; rural infrastructure is implemented and maintained with equipment driven by fossil fuels. From an economist’s perspective, rural industries are a diminishing percentage of GDP and of declining importance to national welfare. This jaundiced view fails to understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we self-actualise (ie, expand the national GDP) only after satisfying our basic wants of food and shelter. A community that neglects what underpins the resilience of basic food production and infrastructure becomes more vulnerable to climate variability and extremes…    an extract from ‘Community resilience and the hazards of climate’, by William Kininmonth

Read more here:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11986&page=0