Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Mothers rally against “GM” milk

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“Mothers and children will rally outstide the United Dairyfarmers of Victora (UDV) conference in Melbourne on Tuesday to voice their opposition to milk produced from cows fed genetically modified (GM) grain,” according to a story in Farmonline.

Mothers Against GE (MAdGE) spokeswoman, Glenda Lindsay, said the group – a newly formed coalition of anti-GM mothers, grandmothers and children –wanted to show farmers, Victorian consumers didn’t want genetically engineered (GE) or GM milk.”

But they are already drinking it.

At least Victorian dairy farmers have been feeding their cows various amounts of GM soy — a product that has been imported into Australia from the US — for years.

This was a finding in an independent report by Professor Peter Lloyd commissioned by the Victorian government some years ago.

According to the spokeswoman for the mothers, Glenda Lindsay, “There are no peer reviewed studies that prove it is safe to drink milk from cows fed GM products.”

But there is no difference in milk from cows feed GM soy and non-GM soy.

I was wondering how some Australian mothers — presumably educated women — could be so ignorant. Then I remembered comment from a colleague some months ago, made in the context of all the global warming hysteria, he said, “Most people are too busy to think, so they ‘buy’ opinion.”

There is a campaign to maintain the current moratorium banning the planting of GM food crops in Victoria. The ban was introduced some years ago, following Greenpeace campaigning, and is set to expire in February 2008.

Ms Lindsay also said, “It makes no sense to grow GM crops when most polls show shoppers don’t want GM foods.”

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Comments from Glenda Lindsay are from a story in this week’s Stock & Land. Also available through FarmOnline http://www.farmonline.com.au/news_daily.asp?ag_id=43211

The Cost of Supplying Melbourne With Irrigation Water: A Note from Rojo

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Hi Jennifer,

I’ve just read an article in The Australian regarding a possible sweetner for the Bracks government, namely consideration of a $1.5 billion pipeline to supply Melbourne with water from the Murray river system.

I haven’t found what the other options — desalination, reuse of stormwater and a scheme to use waste water to replace water used by power generators in the Latrobe Valley — were going to cost the Victorian goverment but I’m blown away with spending $1.5 billion for 150 gigalitres per year. And the water will have to be sourced from consumptive users and almost certainly not from environmental flows.

Maybe the $1.5 billion price tag includes the cost of purchasing this water, if not it will add another $ 2-300 million.

To my way of thinking that leaves the capital cost in the region of $10-12 million per gigalitre, or $10-12,000 per megalitre. The opportunity cost of that money will hover close to $1,000 per megalitre let alone any pumping, cleaning, maintenance and payback for the $1.5 billion outlay. And if we account for the lost agricultural production(say $250 per megalitre) due to the loss of the water, then cost per megalitre approaches $2,000.

And to top it all off we’re not harnessing any new water for that outlay.

I can’t begin to guess what it would cost to harvest storm water, which is wasted at a cost to the environment, or getting waste water to power generation sites, at least doing either ‘create’ new water. Water that can be used without infringing on anyone. I’ll assume this is an expensive option.

I do note the Victorian government hasn’t mentioned recycling.

What I do have, is some understanding of desalination. One of the more recent installations is in Ashkelon, Israel. This plant has a capital cost of about $300million( US$250m) to produce 110 gigalitres per year at a cost of $700 per megalitre (52 cents US/m3)

Desalination of seawater takes 3-4kw of electricity to produce a m3 (1,000 litres).

This desalination plant has it’s own gas fired 80MW power station. I would guess such power consumption will have some people jumping up and down, but to put 80 MW into perspective it is less than 1% of Victoria’s generating capacity of 9,000 MW and is close to 10% of Victoria’s current (no pun intended) renewable electricity output of 767 MW of which 580 MW are hydro generated.

All we need to do is expand renewables by 10% to keep blood pressures in check.

A Texas site on desalination supports the Israel experience. Though slightly more expensive – those Israeli’s know how to drive a bargain.

Regards,
Rojo

Japan Really a Winner from Recent IWC Meeting: A Note from Ann Novek

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Greenpeace and most anti whaling organisations proclaimed victory for the whales after the annual International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Anchorage and a deafening defeat for the pro-whaling nations.

This is hardly the truth.

Most IWC delegates agree that the current IWC is dysfunctional and the positions are deadlocked. The moderate minded delegates still believe that the IWC is the best body to solve and manage whaling issues.

Japan threatens as usual to leave the IWC , but Norway has stated it has no intention to leave the IWC and the IWC is the best body to take care of its interests.

So who are the winners and losers in this high political game?

In a recent comment here at the blog, Sidney Holt, one of the persons behind the design of the whaling moratorium, stated:

“Yesterday the on-line paper American Prospect (www.prospect.org) published my evaluation of the present whaling crisis that some of the participants in this debate here might care to look at. I have concluded that the authorities and commercial interests in Japan do not wish the moratorium on commercial whaling to be lifted, because conducting commercial whaling under Special permits for ostensibly scientific purposes is more convenient. The overwhelming evidence now is that Japan intends to indefinitely expand its unregulated whaling, as the major whale populations recover. The argument that whales are eating “our” fish, and that some of them are now competing with the others and hampering thier recovery are purely devices to justify future unsustainable whaling, which is the only kind that can be profitable. The argument about meat stockpiles is interesting because it is really not about selling the current catches but rather preparing the consumer base for the planned increases in production in the coming decade.. Look at it that way and then consider the discussion now going on in the technical press in Japan regarding the projected design of a new and bigger factory ship, and increasing the numbers of catcher boats in order to fully use the factories processing capacity.”

Another scientist, Atsushi Ishii, from Tohoku University in Sendai , Japan, shared a similar view. He believes the current status quo suits the Japan’s Fisheries Agency:

“Japan is happy to continue scientific whaling; but they say scientific whaling is needed because they want to overturn the moratorium, so they need the moratorium to continue scientific whaling,” he says.”

And what did the antis say?

In the BBC article, Dr Epstein from the University of Sydney said:

“There’s that relationship between NGOs and governments that is quite functional from both of their perspectives,” observes Dr Epstein.

“Governments look quite green because they’re listening to NGOs; NGOs get listened to in an international system of states where there isn’t much room normally for them. So there isn’t much incentive to listen to anything else.”

In this thesis, the NGOs dictate what governments need to say to look green, the governments say it, and NGOs duly say nice things about them. Reporters lap it all up, even help foment it, because they know what story their readers are expecting; it is all utterly predictable, and nobody has an incentive to step out of line.

Everyone’s a winner; except, of course, the whales.

Ann Novek
Sweden

PS The Norwegian media even pointed out that Norway was praised at the IWC meeting for its thorough report on how long it takes to kill a whale!

Save the Planet, Throw C02 Into Outer Space?

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“Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”…

Read the complete article entitled ‘The Earth Today Stands in Imminent Peril’ by Steve Connor: http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

The piece finishes with comment that “a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

“Alfred Wong of the University of California, Los Angeles, at last week’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in Acapulco, … reckons the problem is not so much that CO2 is being thrown away, but that it is not being thrown far enough. According to his calculations, a little helping hand would turn the Earth’s magnetic field into a conveyor belt that would vent the gas into outer space, whence it would never return…

Read the compete article from The Economist entitled ‘Stairway to Heaven’ here: http://www.economist.com/research/articlesbysubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348924&story_id=9253976

Wrong Science Leads to Pointless Economics: A Note from Bob Carter

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“With understandable reluctance, Prime Minister Howard recently donned the political hair-shirt of a carbon trading system. On the very same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a USA radio interview that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with”.

NASA, of course, is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: “We study global climate change, that is in our authorization, we think we do it rather well. I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change”. Such a clear statement that science accomplishment should carry primacy over policy advice is both welcome and overdue, and especially so given that most Australian science agencies conflate these two things.

Nonetheless, there is something worrying about one of Dr Griffin’s other statements, which said that “I have no doubt …. that a trend of global warming exists”. Griffin seems here to be referring to HUMAN-CAUSED global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the IPCC show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this 8 year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 ppm (4%) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17%). (Note that the global warming trends of between 1 and 2 deg. C/century many people quote based on satellite temperature measurements have NOT been corrected for these non-greenhouse factors).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades. This cooling, which may already have started, could prove to be of damaging magnitude.

How then is it possible for Dr Griffin to assert so boldly that human-caused global warming is happening right now? Well, he is in good company for similar statements have been made recently by several western heads of state at the G8 summit meeting. For instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who possesses a PhD in Physics, asserts that climate change (i.e. global warming) “is also essentially caused by humankind”. And US President George Bush in turn implies a human causation for warming when he says that “America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases”.

In actual fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human (or carbon dioxide) caused warming. For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates that something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.

In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations. As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.

Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget, and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.

It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of Australia’s government on the issue, and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.

Senior Kansas geologist Lee Gerhard commented that NASA administrator “Griffin’s statement focuses on the hubris that affects much of public policy (on global warming). It is great to know that someone out there besides geologists understands that humans do not dominate earth’s dynamic systems”. Not only do humans not dominate earth’s current temperature trend, but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.

In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than US$50 billion dollars on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one. Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system. The swingeing costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.”

by Professor Bob Carter,
An environmental scientist who studies ancient climate change,
@ James Cook University.

This is the unedited version of a shorter piece published today in The Courier Mail: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21920043-27197,00.html

Government Should Stop Blaming The Drought?

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Ken Smith, Coordinator-General and Director-General,
Department of Infrastructure, Queensland Government.

A recent publication circulated by your Department, Water for the Future, argued that Queensland is experiencing the worst drought in more than 100 years. It included the following diagram to make this point, and at face value this implies that unforeseeable drought is the major cause of southeast Queensland’s water supply crisis.

SEQ small_Water Inflow.jpg

However, others observers have offered different explanations, some of which which I have outlined in Structural Incompetence and SE Queensland’s Water Crisis.

In particular, it has been suggested that SE Queensland’s catchments (Wivenhoe in particular) are subject to very infrequent but large water inflows, with low inflows at other times sometimes for long periods. This hypothesis implies that:

The current series of years with low inflows would not be unique and should have been anticipated. If so, institutional incompetence is part of the cause of SE Queensland’s current crisis; and the diagram your Department presented might give a false impression of the situation, as it shows high past inflows averaged over long periods that potentially conceal this problem (ie infrequent large inflows and many years of low inflows).

I would appreciate clarification of the facts of the matter, as this has serious implications for public confidence in the institutions that have been responsible for water supply management in Queensland.

Regards,
John Craig
Centre for Policy and Development Systems