Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Dead But Won’t Lie Down: Vincent Grey Comments on Tuvulu

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“Everybody knows about Tuvulu, It is becoming inundated by the rising sea level because of global warming. The New Zealand Government has recognised the plight of the embattled inhabitants by offering special deals for immigration. So have the Australians. It forms a regular topic at meetings of the Pacific Forum and beyond, and there cannot possibly be any disagreement on the matter.”

writes Vincent Grey today.

And he continues:

“A couple of years’ ago I was interviewed by the Dunedin-based Natural History Unit as part of documentary for the National Geographic Channel. I had over an hour to give my views on greenhouse warming, which I expected would appear in an internationally distributed documentary. They sent me a copy of the final doco “to enjoy”. I found that it was all about how Tuvulu is faced with imminent disaster, with a “moaning Minnie” lady persistently bemoaning the loss of her homeland from a comfortable flat in Brisbane. My contribution had been almost eliminated.

But Tuvulu reminds me of a comic song I used to sing of Gracie Fields called “He’s dead but he won’t lie down”. Tuvulu persistently refuses to subside.

A tide gauge to measure sea level has been in existence at Tuvulu since 1977, run by the University of Hawaii It showed a negligible increase of only 0.07 mm per year over two decades It fell three millimeters between 1995 and 1999. The complete record can still be seen on John Daly’s website, www.john-daly.com.

Obviously this could not be tolerated, so the gauge was closed in 1999 and a new, more modern tide gauge was set up by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s National Tidal Center by Flinders University at Adelaide. But Tuvulu refuses to submit to political pressure.The sea level has actually fallen .since then

Tuvulu cannot be allowed to get away with it. So Greenpeace employed Dr John Hunter. a climatologist of the University of Tasmania, who obligingly “adjusted” the Tuvulu readings upwards to comply with changes in ENSO and those found for the island of Hawaii and, miraculously, he found a sea level rise of “around” 1.2 mm a year.which, also miraculously, agrees with the IPCC global figure.

Since all this seems biased, or politically influenced, Dr John Church of the CSIRO at Hobart, Tasmania, a Lead Author of the IPCC Chapter on “Sea Level”, plus his colleague Dr Neil White, have sought to reverse actual measured trends by “combining records from tide gauges from all over the world with satellite altimeter data to assess regional variation”. Unsurprisingly, and equally miraculously, they reach the same conclusion as Greenpeace and the IPCC. All this has to be imposed on poor little Tuvulu to “prove” global warming.and speed emigration.

The IPCC Chapter on Sea Level is one of the more dishonest. It practices two important deceptions. First, it completely fails to mention the fact that many tide gauges are situated close to cities where the land is subsiding because of erection of heavy buildings, or removal of ground water, oil and minerals. . It so happens that the island of Hawaii is one of the more heavily populated Pacific islands where the sea level is “rising” because the land is “falling” Another reason for upwards bias is Port Adelaide, Australia, where they decided to increase the water level in the harbour to allow for larger ships, They dredged and built a bar on the harbour. Unsurprisingly, the level rose on the tide-gauge. Corrections for these upwards biases in tide-gauge measurements have never been permitted to be discussed by the IPCC.

The other deception of the IPCC Sea Level Chapter is in statistics. The sea level averages are so inaccurate that they have to supply only one standard deviation as a measure of inaccuracy, instead of the otherwise universal use of two standard deviations. One standard deviation gives only a one in three chance that the measurement lies outside the limits. Two standard deviations puts it up to one in twenty. If you use the proper figures you find that the accuracy sometimes permits a less than one in twenty chance of a sea level fall. That must never be allowed

This whole melancholy story is told in an article in ‘Science’ 2006 Volume 312, pages 734 to 736, It seems that the Greenpeace organisation is now occupying the role of the late Trofim Lysenko in their ability to reverse the findings of scientific research.

Vincent Gray
Wellington, New Zealand

‘It’s not the things you don’t know that fool you. It’s the things you do know that aint so’ Josh Billings”

International Whaling Commission Meeting Starts Friday in The West Indies

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The 58th Annual Meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is being held from 16 to 20 June 2006 at the St. Kitts Marriott Resort and the Royal Beach Casino in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts, West Indies. The website “Kujira Portal” will broadcast the IWC meeting’s highlights and press conferences starting from this Friday, 16 June 2006.

So if you live somewhere like Australia you have a choice, you can stay up all night watching the soccer (World Cup in Germany) or the ‘wailing’ at the IWC.

The scientific papers underpinning the discussion are available at the Scientific Committee home page of the IWC website under the section titled ‘In-depth Assessments’ (http://www.iwcoffice.org/_documents/sci_com/SC58docs/sc58docs.htm).

David@Tokyo will no doubt be blogging on the event from Tokyo.

Sally Warriner in Southern Sudan: I Salute You

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“I would rip off someone’s arms at the moment to get to a clean, crisp, delicious, fresh salad and grilled fish which was not going to reappear again within 30 minutes in mutant form. Tonight is my cooking night, so I have to go to the store and choose which can of bland vegetable will be to added to spongy potatoes and fried onions. None of which I can eat at the moment, but everyone else will.

Probably what I will have will be a Tusker (the very excellent Kenyan beer) and a couple of cigarettes. Sadly I have succumbed to the aid organisation affliction – but I just had to give myself a break on something, and it is only three at night, never during the day.”

That’s a quote from my friend Sally Warriner who’s just been published by Online Opinion, click here for the article titled ‘Everything is not gwar in Sudan’. Sally is a medical worker right now in war torn southern Sudan.

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I was working as an entomologist in the northern Sudan in May 1990:

Sudan May 1990.jpg .

I’m the one in blue jeans and blue shirt. There was no beer or cigarette for me then. Alcohol was, and I think still is, banned in northern Sudan. I survived on the meal a day I got, if we got, to the next Forestry Research Station by about 11am.

I was travelling along the Blue Nile with a couple of Sudanese foresters. We survived on chai tea in the evening. Since that trip to the Sudan in 1990 I’ve been grateful for a meal in the evening. I remember going to bed feeling so hungry!

Double the Number, Half the Price: Toyoto’s Vision for Hybrid Cars

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Toyota is reported at CNN to be going to double the number of hybrid cars in its vehicle line-up soon after 2010 meaning it has targetted sales of 1 million hybrid cars annually.

I wonder what percentage of total sales this will make hybrids?

Toyota has also indicated it wants to halve the cost of hybrids.

Competitors including DaimlerChrysler are claiming diesel is the way to go with a 20-30 percent better fuel economy than gasoline cars and they are more affordable. I guess you can also run the diesel cars on biodiesel and in this way move from oil dependence.

And its the move from “oil dependence” and also “reducing pollution” that Toyota claim is driving their “endorsement” of the hybrid tecnology.

… and I wonder how much of the Prius marketing is about positioning the brand ‘Toyota’ as environmentally responsible?

Honda Civic Australia is trying to go one better. The company will guarantee the planting of 18 trees through Greenfleet when you buy your next Civic Hybrid. That’s apparently enough trees to absorb all the vehicle’s greenhouse gas emissions for three years.

I wonder how many trees you would need to plant to cover the emmissions from the manufacture of the car itself?

… and I wonder where they are planting the trees?

Doublethink on Groundwater (Part 2)

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Water is meant to be a really precious commodity in Australia, particularly in the Murray Darling Basin. Yet the Murray Darling Basin Commission recently announced, and with some pride, that the ‘National Salinity Prize’ had been awarded to Pyramid Creek Salt Interception and Harvesting Scheme, a scheme that evaporates precious water to sell subsidizes salt using old technology.

The project was explained on Television, on Channel Nine’s Sunday Program:

“ROSS COULTHART: Courtesy of this month’s Budget, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has another half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to spend. Much of it will be going on expensive schemes to stop salt reaching the rivers similar to this one in northern Victoria near Pyramid Hill. This is Pyramid Salt a private company funded with $13 million dollars of taxpayers’ money. Here they pump saline water from underground and harvest the salt it contains, for sale.

Does it make you laugh that people in Sydney are paying six bucks for a 250g box of salt that you blokes are desperate to throw away in this part of the world?

GAVIN PRIVETT, project manager, Pyramid Salt: No it doesn’t make me laugh. Actually, it makes me cry because the in-between guy is getting all the money.

ROSS COULTHART: But it’s only here at all because of an environmental blunder years ago, when attempts to lower the watertable under here ended up poisoning the Murray River.

GAVIN PRIVETT: Initially, what they looked at, they started putting drainage systems and then the problem was they realised they were transferring the problem from one place to another. They put in drainage systems. The next thing it was going into the Murray.

WENDY CRAIK: That’s true and I think that’s a fact of life, that science moves on, that people learn more about systems, learn more about what they should and shouldn’t do.

ROSS COULTHART: So it’s a multi-million dollar patch-up for a past mistake and it’s not a long-term solution for salinity.

GAVIN PRIVETT: You can’t put projects like this all over the place. One, people don’t eat enough salt. It’s a low value commodity. It’s not the answer to the problem. What we’re doing is we’re just intervening and I believe it’s probably as a short-term fix which we’re probably looking to buy some time.”

Its not only a “multi-million dollar patch-up”, the salt interception scheme is using groundwater, extracting groundwater, to evaporate the salt.

I explained in my last blog post with reference to a recent report titled ‘Risks to the shared water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ written by the CSIRO and published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, in particular the section titled ‘Groundwater Extraction’, that groundwater stores are declining at alarming rates and that there is a high level of groundwater extraction in the Shepparton-Katunga region from the salt interception schemes.

The Pyramid Creek Salt Interception Scheme is in this region.

But this is the spin that the Murray Darling Basin Commission put on it in the media release announcing the prize:

“National Prize highlights continuing fight against salinity

A joint public-private salt harvesting scheme that each year diverts 22,000 tonnes of salt from the Murray River today won the prestigious Engineers’ Australia National Salinity Prize.

The prize for new technology and other practical outcomes tackling salinity was awarded to Pyramid Creek Salt Interception and Harvesting Scheme by the Governor-General, Major General Michael Jeffery, AC, CVO, MC at Parliament House Canberra.

The first stage of the $13 million Pyramid Creek Salt Interception Scheme near Kerang, Victoria, was opened in April this year and is funded by the Victorian, South Australian, New South Wales and Australian Governments through the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC).

Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) has overseen construction and now manages the scheme on behalf of the MDBC’s partner governments, while Pyramid Salt run the commercial salt harvesting facility.

MDBC Chief Executive Dr Wendy Craik said MDBC co-sponsor the award as it serves to highlight the ongoing battle against salinity across Australia.

Dr Craik said the consensus of scientific knowledge underpinned the commitment Basin governments have consistently shown by investing in such schemes. “This prize will further encourage the important ongoing debate about the salinity challenges faced by the nation”.

“This prize also acknowledges the positive effects such projects have on communities, the environment and the local economy.

“One of a network of engineering works, schemes like Pyramid Creek make immediate gains against salinity Basin-wide and form part of the $60 million Basin Salinity Management Strategy supported by all Basin governments,” Dr Craik said.

“More than 1,000 tonnes of salt would enter the Murray River system every day were it not for the operation of these schemes at strategic points along the river”.

Pyramid Creek, like several other salt interception schemes, is a large-scale groundwater pumping and drainage project that intercepts water flows and disposes of them, generally by evaporation. The salt is then harvested for commercial purposes.”

What’s the relative value of the water to the salt?

What about a prize for a technology that gets rid of the salt without evaporating the water?

Doublethink on Groundwater (Part 1)

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Doublethink is when we hold two contradictory beliefs in our minds simultaneously and accept both of them. Doublethink has been described as a form of trained, willful blindness to contradictions.

I reckon it afflicts a good percent of academics, activists, politicians and bureaucrats who comment on the management of water, particularly, groundwater in the Murray Darling Basin.

They are on the one hand concerned that there is not enough water and will be even less as a consequence of global warming, but at the same time they worry about rising groundwater now and into the future.

Consider a recent report titled ‘Risks to the shared water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ written by the CSIRO and published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, in particular the section titled ‘Groundwater Extraction’.

It begins by stating that “groundwater stores are declining at alarming rates and this may jeopardise its future use locally”. It goes on to explain different ways that groundwater extraction can lead to reduced stream flows including:

1. When the area of pumping is close enough to a river that the hydraulic gradient between the area of pumping and the stream can be increased or even reversed, such that water flows from the stream to the aquifer, and

2. Extraction of groundwater that would otherwise flow into the river at a downstream point.

Read on and there is reference to high levels of groundwater extraction in the Shepparton-Katunga region contributing to salinity mitigation. This is code for salt interception schemes are a form of groundwater extraction.

There have been quite a few salt interceptions schemes built along the Murray River since 1982 to reduce river salinity levels and they appear to have been very successful at reducing river salinity levels. For example, levels at the key site of Morgan — which is just upstream from the offshoots for Adelaide’s water supply– have halved over the last 20 years.

The recent special federal government budget allocation of $500 million is for more salt interception schemes.

But hang-on, how much lower do we want to push Murray River salt levels and what is the tradeoff in terms of lost groundwater?

The section of the CSIRO report on ‘Groundwater Extraction’ then concludes with the comment that, “Clearing of native vegetation and irrigation has lead to raised water levels in many parts of the Basin, forcing saline groundwater out into the streams”.

No.

Where this was an issue we have constructed salt interception schemes and, across most of the Basin the problem is now falling, not rising groundwater levels.

Indeed groundwater levels in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Coleambally irrigation areas — the regions considered most at risk of rising groundwater in eastern Australia — have generally fallen in the past decade.

They were rising in the 1970s but started falling by the late 1990s.

In 2004, the CSIRO provided me with the following reasons for the general fall in groundwater levels: improved land and water management practices; relatively dry climate over the past ten years and increased deeper groundwater pumping and higher induced leakage from shallow to deeper aquifers.

At what point will there be a realization that river salinity and rising groundwater are no longer key issues, the real issue is disappearing groundwater and it is likely to be exacerbated by the next salt interception scheme?