Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for April 2020

Not Running Out of Oil, or Sunshine

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I remember through the 1970s, we were meant to run out of oil, soon. In fact, as long as I can remember we have been running out of oil, soon.

Instead, oversupply is such that the benchmark for US oil fell below zero for the first time ever a couple of days ago. That is, the share market suggested oil couldn’t even be given away because it was in such oversupply.

There is no shortage of oil despite more than 7.6 billion people on planet Earth, and so many vehicles powered by it.

Prices have collapsed, because despite all the pumping from ‘Mother Earth’ since I was a child, there is still more. Because of the pandemic, global demand, not supply, has fallen dramatically. In fact, the worldwide supply glut has created a worldwide shortage of storage space for oil.

The headlines read:

Oil futures collapsed to below zero for the first time ever

Oil plunges for a second day

Yet still we have movies by famous Americans claiming an imminent shortage because:

Too many human beings are using too much, too fast …

That’s according to the latest Michael Moore movie entitled ‘Planet of the Humans’, released earlier this week, which was about the same time oil couldn’t be given away.

The movie is long and a bit tedious and laments our so-called ‘addiction’ to not only oil, but also coal. Yet it is different, because it also effectively shows up ‘renewables’ as something of a scam, if their objective is long term energy security and sustainability.

Surprisingly for Moore, the movie looks beyond the popular to explain that whether solar panels or wind turbines: both are built using ‘fossil fuel’ infrastructure.

In the movie, Moore interviews a technician who explains how silicon is mined and then processed in very hot furnaces with coal. And that this is what solar panels are actually made of – silicon and coal!

The qualities of cement and steel consumed in the construction of a single wind turbine are also detailed.

The new Michael Moore movie also shows us electric cars fuelled by a power grid based on 95% coal.

So, is electricity from coal better than oil, and how could we possibly still have any of either of them? Since I was a young girl at the beach, these type of documentaries have explained we are running out of both.

I am also reminded of how the prices of various natural resources has tended down over the past few decades. It was in the early 1980s that Julian Simon famously betted Paul Ehrlich that the price of Cooper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten would fall. And they have.

Julian Simon explains why in his book The Ultimate Resource published in 1981. Yet back in the early 1980s, and still today, the conventional wisdom has claimed we would all be undone by resource scarcity. Simon explains that our notions of increasing resource-scarcity ignores the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices because of innovation.

Another book, ‘The Future and Its Enemies’ written by Virgina Postrel and published in 1999 puts more context around the notion of innovation. Interestingly Postrel explains why government regulation may only be a problem when it limits innovation. Further, Postrel suggests notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics are some what meaningless. She suggests the more significant battles will be between the values of a type of person she refers to as the ‘dynamists’ versus the ‘statists’. Quoting from an interview some time ago:

In the book, I talk about the sort of core values of dynamists versus stasists. The core values of dynamists are – it’s really about learning. It’s about discovery. The idea is we don’t really know the best way of doing whatever, and that requires a lot of experimentation, trial and error learning, competition, criticism. It’s a messy process, but it’s the process through which we discover better ways of doing things, whether that’s in business, technology, or the way we live our everyday lives.

On the stasis side, there’s sort of two competing or two complementary ideas rather. One is the ideal of stability – that the good society is the society that doesn’t change. And the other, which I associate with sort of technocratic stasis, is the idea of control – that someone needs to be in charge to set us on the right path and to decide centrally what that will be.

How might this pandemic show the need for regulation and cohesion, while allowing innovation?

That oil prices are at unprecedented lows must be upsetting established world orders? I hope so. Then again, I’m a dynamist.

It is a fact that there has never been so many people on planet Earth and that we live during a time of great wealth but also great uncertainty. Our times perhaps provide unique opportunities for both Postrel’s dynamists and also the technocratic stasis.

In Australia and around the world, how much have our values changed in just the last two months? And yet we have perhaps more social cohesion, at least here in Australia? And many are looking for new rules of engagement, to provide some certainty.

As long as the rules created by the technocrats are clear, and there is still incentive, there is perhaps potential for great innovation: for us to innovate our way out of this pandemic. It should be possible through trial and error, spontaneous adjustment, and adaptation – even if we can’t travel, or party, or watch sport. In fact, there may be more time for thinking.

It is a fact that we can still innovate for a new and different future, and that the best things in life will still be free, even if the movie-makers keep telling us that we are running out of oil, soon.

In Noosa where I live, the sun is still shining, and it shines for everyone.

My little sister and I enjoying the sunshine in Noosa back in the 1970s, when the price of oil was higher and we were about to run out of it.

Coral Catastrophes Imagined

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Exactly one year ago yesterday, I was getting off a train in Proserpine, looking to pickup a hire car to drive to Bowen. I wanted to know if the coral there was all dead, or not. Bowen is a coastal town in North Queensland, not far from Abbott Point that is the coal terminal for the controversial Adani coal mine.

Judge Salvador Vasta had earlier that week handed down his findings regarding the sacking of Peter Ridd. He had exonerated Ridd and explained that James Cook University had wrongly sacked him.

Some claim that it all came to a sorry end for Ridd because he dared to question the consensus of scientific opinion concerning the health of the Great Barrier Reef – particularly the impact of global warming. The university claimed it was because he had become ‘un-collegial’ and did not follow various directives while disclosing confidential information.

These issues were argued in the Federal Circuit Court in Brisbane a month earlier, in March 2019. Very few people realized that at the heart of the case were a couple of what might be best described as fake-news photographs promoted by Terry Hughes.

This is the same Terry Hughes who is now claiming that 60%* of the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached, and that this is an extraordinary catastrophe for which we should all be ashamed.

If Peter Ridd had become un-collegial and disclosed confidential information, it was because he was fed-up with the fake news. As Ridd wrote in chapter 1 of the book that I edited three years ago, a chapter entitled ‘The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Corals, and Problems with Policy Science’:

I have carried out half-a-dozen audits on some of the science claiming damage to the Great Barrier Reef, and in every case I have discovered serious problems.

The first of the 21 findings handed down in the Federal Court by Judge Vasta one year ago, concerned photographs used by Terry Hughes to claim that the corals off Bowen had been variously destroyed by global warming, ocean acidification and sediment run-off. Hughes claimed where there had once been healthy coral reef, there was now only mudflat.

This is the mudflat at Bramston Reef, with the Gloucester Island backdrop, that Terry Hughes claims now replaces once healthy coral reef. I walked a kilometre towards the ocean at low tide and found hectare upon hectare of healthy coral on Easter Friday in 2019.
I took this photograph on Easter Friday in April 2019. It shows corals at low tide with the Gloucester Island backdrop, and is about one kilometre to the south east of the photograph showing only mudflat.
Bramston Reef is to the south of Bowen, and across from Stone Island. Terry Hughes has claimed there is now only mud flat where there were once healthy coral at Bramston Reef. This map features in the film Beige Reef.

The most recent claims from Hughes, that all of the Great Barrier Reef is at risk from global warming, do not follow close-up examination of individual corals or even individual reefs. Rather Hughes has flown in a light plane in all sorts of conditions through the day even when it was windy, and looked down from a very high altitude, from some hundreds of metres away.

His claims are being uncritically reported as fact across the world, including in popular scientific magazines.

I’ve flown a drone at 30 metres above a coral reef and spotted white corals. I’ve snorkelled that same reef and found the same white corals to be very much alive and with zooxanthellae. I made a film of this adventure, documenting its health for that moment in time. That was in August 2019. I named that reef and the film: Beige Reef. You can see the white corals from the drone footage at 9.38, 10.35 and 11.07 minutes.

Beige reef fringes the north facing bay at Stone Island, which is across the channel from Bramston Reef at the entrance to Bowen Harbour.

The white corals were large; they are commonly known as bolder corals, and the species at Beige Reef was Galaxea fascicularis. I made this identification based on information in J.E.N. Vernon’s three-part encyclopedia ‘Corals of the Worlds’ using my close-up photographs of the extended tentacles. These were taken on the same day that I took the drone footage showing these same corals as white in the film Beige Reef.

A boulder coral, Galaxea fascicularis, photographed at Beige Reef on 27th August 2019 by Jen while snorkelling.
A close-up of the tentacles of the same bolder coral, Galaxea fascicularis, photographed on 27th August 2019.

If we go back eight years, to July 2012, it is a fact that Terry Hughes stood in front of 2,500 marine scientists at an international conference in Cairns and claimed the corals off-Bowen are dead. That claim, made while showing a picture of the mudflat at Bramston Reef just to the south of Bowen, was a front-page story the next day in The Cairns Post.

Peter Ridd had some photographs taken in 2015 showing healthy corals off-Bowen, he got sacked for this effort. To back-up Terry Hughes, Tara Clark from the University of Queensland and colleagues (including David Wachenfeld from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority), had a paper published by the prestigious journal Nature claiming that there are no-longer any Acropora spp. corals at Stone Island. In the film Beige Reef, I show 25 hectares of this coral type. I made Beige Reef to back-up Peter Ridd.

I don’t know of a single journalist prepared to visit Bowen, Bramston Reef, Beige Reef or Stone Island to check the veracity of the claims by me and Peter Ridd versus Terry Hughes or Tara Clark. Yet it is not complicated, though it will be political. The saga has been on-going since at least 2015.

Jennifer Marohasy: come visit the reef with me, Misha Ketchell

Exactly one year ago, keen to see for myself I walked across that mudflat at low tide, after catching the train to Proserpine and then driving up to Bowen. I walked across the mudflat on the afternoon of Easter Friday in April 2019, and kept going for about 1 kilometre. I found so much live coral, the other side of that mudflat.

I returned to Bowen four months later in August 2019 with skipper Rob McCulloch, marine biologist Walter Starck, and an underwater photographer.

Having the boat that McCulloch towed down from Cairns made it possible for us to get all around Stone Island. As it turned-out we found several coral reefs fringing Stone Island, including Beige Reef with all the Acropora spp.. To be clear, there is not just coral the other side of the mudflat at Bramston reef, but all-around Stone Island that is just across the channel from Bramston Reef.

Surely it’s time journalists and their editors took some responsibility for the information that they republish? It seems they take anything provided by particular academics that fit a narrative, and give it a free run.

So far, Hughes has not published this most recent aerial survey in any peer-reviewed journal, or even made available a list of the locations with bleached corals. No doubt he will in due course. Then we will probably see a second wave of uncritical reporting by the mainstream media, again claiming the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef. The bottom-line seems to be that we live at a time when the dominant narrative demands an ecological disaster. It is as though almost anything that can be imagined, and told as a story by academics, can become a news headline. There is no checking.

I can only ask that ordinary folk be ever sceptical of such stories. Scepticism should be worn as a badge of honour, particularly in these times when it can be so hard to know whether there really is a coral catastrophe, or not. How can we find the truth, when even Nature publishes incorrect reports: claiming there are no Acropora spp. corals at Stone Island where I found and filmed 25 hectares on 27 August 2019.

Filming corals just below the surface at Beige Reef, which fringes the north facing bay at Stone Island. This photograph was taken on 27th August 2019.
Stone Island has sand, as well as stone, and corals as well as mudflat. This photograph was taken at the entrance to Bowen Harbour from Stone Island in August 2019 with Rob McCulloch and Walter Starck in the distance.

***

Postscript:

Quoting from an ABC News story:
Great Barrier Reef found to be coral bleached from north to south for first time
By national science and technology reporter Michael Slezak and the specialist reporting team’s Penny Timms
Updated Tue at 9:52am

“The Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing the most widespread bleaching ever recorded, with 60 per cent of reefs across all three regions affected, according to a detailed survey of the system.

Key points:

1. Warmer sea temperatures have led to coral bleaching along the length of the Great Barrier Reef

2. More coral reefs were bleached in 2016, although the damage was concentrated in the north

3. Marine biologist Terry Hughes says the reef is rapidly adapting to climate change

It is the third mass bleaching event on the reef in five years — a phenomenon primarily caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and one that had never been recorded before 1997.

“We were hoping that this year would be a relatively mild bleaching event, but unfortunately that’s not the case,” said Professor Terry Hughes, head of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-07/great-barrier-reef-most-widespread-coral-bleaching-on-record/12107054
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The image at the very top of this blog post is of Matt and me on Easter Monday 2019, heading out to Middle Island from Bowen Marina. Much thanks to John Barnes for organising this adventure, and for taking the photograph.

Falling Sea Levels, a Rainbow and a Full Moon

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I was there again on the wave cut platform to see how high the waves broke on the very highest tide for this month, and also to exercise. (During this Corona virus pandemic we are allowed outside to exercise.)

The photograph was taken by Caroline Forsyth yesterday at 7.23 am on 7th April 2020.

I’m standing on the wave cut platform at the time of the highest tide, yet the waves don’t reach anywhere near the cliff face.

Once upon a time when sea levels were higher, I would have been waist-deep in surf. I am referring to a period just a few thousand years ago, known as the Holocene High Stand.

The waves would have pounded that cliff face, occasionally bringing down great lumps of rock from above.

As the cliff-face retreated landward, the platform became wider. That is why this type of formation is called a Wave Cut Platform.

There are similar geological formations all around the world.

The peer-reviewed geological literature explains that they are evidence sea levels have been falling, not rising, over the last few thousand years. (Some relevant technical references are listed in the postscript.)

Of course, the height of the sea tide varies with the 18.6 year lunar declination cycle, and most obviously varies with the moon’s monthly cycle about the Earth. Yesterday was the highest tide and it occurred on the morning the day before the Full Moon.

Of the three Super Moons this year, tonight’s will come closest to Earth and thus appear the largest.

I am going to be out exercising again tonight, and watching the Full Moon come up.

For the Pagan, the Full Moon represents a time to be grateful. I am grateful that today my daughter is released from two weeks of mandatory quarantine having returned exactly two weeks ago from New York. I am grateful.

**** Postscript

If it is the case that failed scientific paradigms are not disproven, but rather they are replaced. We need a new theory of climate, and it could begin with understanding the sea tides and how they vary with the weather during each calendar year, and also the climate over millennia.

Howard Brady wrote to me a year or so ago:

“There is evidence of a gradual fall (not rise) from a high sea level stand between 8000 and 2000 BP. Such evidence comes from an increasing number of peer-reviewed articles describing evidence of this high sea level stand and its decline along the coasts of Australia, South Africa, South America, South Korea, and Vietnam.

There is increasing evidence that such a wide occurrence of a high sea level stand, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, cannot be interpreted as due to crustal movements (Glacial Isostatic Adjustments -GIAs) in different continents at the same time as these areas did not experience any significant glacial or ice crustal loading during the last ice age advances.

Basically, there is now so much data on this fall in sea level from a high-level stand that the GIAs quoted by Dutton and Lambeck 2012 should be abandoned. A few references to peer reviewed articles describing a high sea level stand in the HTM and the fall in sea-level from 8000 -2000 BP are listed below. There is no justification for any glacio-eustatic uplift since 8000 BP that stopped (for some unknown reason about 2000 BP) in regions that did not experience any ice loading during the last glaciation.

Accordi.A, Carbone, F 2016. Evolution of the siliciclastic-carbonate shelf system of the northern Kenyan coastal belt in response to Late Pleistocene-Holocene relative sea level changes. Journal of African Earth Sciences. Volume 123, November 2016, Pages 234-257

Baker,R.G.V., Haworth,R.J; 2000. Smooth or oscillating late Holocene sea-level curve? Evidence from the palaeo-zoology of fixed biological indicators in east Australia and beyond. Marine Geology 163, 367-386.

Baker,R.G.V., Haworth,R.J., Flood,P.G; 2001. Warmer or Cooler late Holocene palaeoenvironments? Interpreting south-east Australian and Brazilian sea level changes using fixed biological indicators and their d18 Oxygen composition. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 168. 249-272.

Baker,R.G.V., Haworth,R.J., Flood,P.G; 2001. Inter-tidal fixed indicators of former Holocene sea levels in Australia; a summary of sites and a review of methods and models. Quaternary International 83-85. 257-273.

Baker,R.G.V., Haworth,R.J., Flood,P.G; 2005.An Oscillating Holocene Sea-level? Revisiting Rottnest Island, Western Australia, and the Fairbridge Eustatic Hypothesis. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue no.42.
Bracco,B. et al; 2014. A reply to “Relative sea level during the Holocene in Uruguay. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.Volume 401.

Bradley, S, Milne,G, Horton,B, Zong,Y 2016. Modelling sea level data from China and Malay-Thailand to estimate Holocene ice-volume equivalent sea level change. Quaternary Science Reviews 137:54-68

Chiba,T et al;, 2016. Reconstruction of Holocene relative sea-level change and residual uplift in the Lake Inba area, Japan. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, PalaeoecologyVolume 441, Part 4,Pages 982-996

Clement, A, Whitehouse,P, Sloss,S 2015. An examination of spatial variability in the timing and magnitude of Holocene relative sea-level changes in the New Zealand archipelago. Quaternary Science Reviews. Volume 131, Part A. January 2016, Pages 73-101

Haworth,R.J., Baker,R.G.V., Flood,P.G; 2001. Predicted and observed Holocene sea-levels on the Australian coast: what do they indicate about hydrostatic models in far field sites? Journal of Quaternary Research 17. 5-6.

Lee, S., Currell. M, Cendon, D. 2015. Marine water from mid-Holocene sea level highstand trapped in a coastal aquifer: Evidence from groundwater isotopes, and environmental significance. Science of The Total Environment. Volume 544. February 2016, Pages 995-1007

Lunning,S, Vahrenholt, F. Im südlichen Afrika lag der Meeresspiegel vor 5000 Jahren um 3 m höher als heute- Kategorien: Allgemein, News/Termine.25. Juni 2018 | 07:30

Oliver and Terry, 2019. Relative sea-level highstands in Thailand since theMid-Holocene based on 14C rock oyster chronology. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology,Volume 517. Pages 30-38

Prieto,A. Peltier, W. 2016. Relative sea-level changes in the Rio de la Plata, Argentina and Uruguay: A review. Quaternary International.
Sloss, Craig R,: 2005. Holocene sea-level change and the amino-stratigraphy of wave-dominated barrier estuaries on the southeast coast of Australia, PhD thesis, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, 20. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/447.

Sloss, C.R, Murray-Wallace,C.V, Jones.B.G; (2007). Holocene sea-level change on the southeast coast of Australia: a review. The Holocene 17, 7. 999-1014.

Strachan K, et al;, 2014. A late Holocene sea-level curve for the east coast of South Africa. S. Afr. j. sci. vol.110 n.1-2