Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Pain for Litte Gain?

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Today’s Courier Mail (pg 57) has a piece titled ‘Rainfall hits five-year low’ explaining how little rain has fallen in Brisbane while noting that the Gold Coast was deluged in June.

It goes on to explain that the Gold Coast City Council wants to lift some of its water restrictions but that Brisbane’s Lord Major is complaining this would jeopardize the increased water restrictions he has planned for Brisbane.

Given the Gold Coast and Brisbane draw their water from different dams, why can’t they have different levels of water restrictions?

The Queensland Premier has been talking up how bad it could be for Brisbane. He was reported in The Australian last week refering to absolute worst case scenarios including that modelling has shown that without rain and without water restrictions, Brisbane would be without water by December 2006. The water restrictions currently being promoted by Brisbane City Council would apparently push this date to February 2007. It hardly seems worth all the pain?

Link to New Orleans

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New Orlean’s daily newspaper The Times-Picayune is now publishing out of Baton Rouge including onto the internet, see http://www.nola.com/ .

This newspaper has a weblog: http://www.nola.com/weblogs/nola/.

Senator Andrew Bartlett’s blog has a post about the situation in New Orleans and links to some bloggers writing from, and about, the situation in New Orleans:

I noted the comment after his post:

“They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you’ll have anarchy”.

Intelligent Design

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E-journal Online Opinion published a piece today titled Evolutionary science isn’t a closed book about the pros and cons of teaching Intelligent Design (ID) in schools and universities.

I read about the concept of ID in the August 15 issue of Time magazine.

It seemed to me to be just a rehash of the creationists argument that because we have such magnificent adaptations, e.g. the human eye, we must have been created by god (… for some ID believers, designed by an alien).

According to the article in Time magazine there has been lots of outrage because President Bush suggested “lessons in evolution include a discussion of Intelligent Design.”

The piece at OLO includes,

The battle lines are rigid. The US science establishment is adamant that ID casts doubt on well-established science, using specious evidence and faulty logic. The attempted incursion into the classroom is not to be tolerated. End of story. Add to this the legal campaign to maintain an iron wall of separation between church and state, and you have a belligerent “them” and “us”.

For their part, the ID leaders are a different breed from evangelical creationists who insist on a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis and Bible Belt morality. They hold PhDs in biology and mathematics from leading universities; some are tenured professors. Their organisational base, the Discovery Institute, located in Seattle, Washington, makes effective use of online, print and DVD promotion. By such means the institute reaches any teacher or student curious enough to run a Google search. Those who look discover telling points scored against the standard position, at least for those at the beginner level, and this embarrassment partly accounts for the science establishment’s anger.

I actually agree with Bush in so much as contrasting belief in ID (and creation)with the theory of evolution is a good way of illustrating the difference between belief and faith versus evidence and science. Let the students learn the difference (between faith and science) and make up their own minds.

PS I really enjoyed discussion of Gould and Ethridge’s ‘punctuated equilibrium theory‘ when I was at university.

Energy for Aquaculture (Part 1)

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I have always been interested in the relative efficiencies of different food production sytems.

I wrote and posted the piece on fishing last night (Let them eat fish)while trying to come to terms with how much money the Australian government is spending to close down a perfectly sustainable fishery – all in response to environmental campaigning driven by a belief we should not fish Great Barrier Reef waters.

The Australian aquaculture industry’s share of the $2.2 billion Australian commercial fishery has been steadily increasing and now represents around 34 per cent,
http://www.abareconomics.com/research/fisheries/fisheries.html .

I guess the trend is to close down ‘wild fisheries’ and eat more from ‘aquaculture’. But is this efficient?

I have been shown around aquaculture facilities and they seem really energy intense. We are taking the pressure off wild populations in building these facilities I am told.

But where is the balance between sustainably harvesting wild populations and energy intense aquaculture?

Let Them Eat Fish

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On 4th July last year the area zoned ‘Green’, and thus off-limits to commercial and recreational fishers in Great Barrier Reef (GBR) water, was increased from 4.5 per cent to 33.3 per cent of the total GBR area. This was the culmination of a hard fought campaign spearheaded by World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

There had been limits on the number of commercial licenses and numbers of fish that could be caught – but this 33.3 per cent represented a massive increase in the actual area off-limits to fishers.

The Federal Government had promised compensation to assist fishermen, related businesses and communities affected by the implementation of the new zoning.

Just yesterday, commercial fishermen said the compensation bill resulting from closures on the Great Barrier Reef could top $100 million. According to ABC Online:

The Federal Government has announced it has already spent more than $40 million buying out fishing licences and supporting businesses affected by the fishing bans.

The Commonwealth says 120 applications have been processed so far and it believes there could be 300 more by the end of the year.

Greg Radley from the Queensland Seafood Industry Association says the total compensation bill will be expensive.

“I would assume that it was somewhere between $60 and $70 million at this stage,” he said.

Alexandra de Blas (ABCRadio National Earthbeat) report in January 2003 that:

Alexandra de Blas: So it’s worth about $50 million in Australia now; what fish do we supply, and to where?

Geoff Muldoon: Since the advent of the trade in 1993, the export of live reef fish from Australia has comprised almost entirely of coral trout. Somewhere between 90% and 95% of all fish that are exported live are coral trout. The trade has increased from around about 100 tonnes per year to about 1200 tonnes per year of coral trout. We’ve seen basically a fishery that was primarily selling frozen fish shift almost entirely to supplying live reef fish. The overall catch of coral trout on the Great Barrier Reef hasn’t actually increased very much at all, in fact it’s remained relatively stable since about the mid ’90s.

Alexandra de Blas: How do our practices here in Australia compare with the practices in Asia and the Pacific?

Geoff Muldoon: Our practices compare very well. Within Australia, fishermen are only permitted to remove coral trout by hook and line techniques, that is, a hook on a handline will be baited with a pilchard, hung over the side of the vessel and the fish will be brought up by the fisherman, kept alive in tanks on the boats, which contrasts very strongly with the cyanide and dynamite fishing and gill net fishing and trap fishing approaches adopted in sort of less developed countries of the world.

Alexandra de Blas: Jeffrey Muldoon, from the International Marine Life Alliance. His organisation and others, are working to ensure that Australia’s standards are adopted around the world.

Australia exports all its fish by air, which reduces mortalities to 2%, a huge reduction on the 50% losses recorded on the transport boats used in Asia.

Australia has traditionally imported relatively large volumes of low value fish and exported small volumes of high value fisheries products, see http://www.abareconomics.com/outlook/PDF/abare_seafood.pdf .

Coral trout are the most heavily line fished species on Australia’s GBR. The annual yield (total line fishery) for the entire GBR (before the increase in Green zone area) had been calculated at 17 kg/km2 by Walter Starck, see http://ipa.org.au/files/IPABackgrounder17-1.pdf, pg 4.

This is very low relative to other Pacific Reefs which average 7,700 kgs/km2 with a sustainable yield calculated at 10,000 kg/km2, see comparison and http://ipa.org.au/files/IPABackgrounder17-1.pdf, pg 5.

I tend to think that government is paying off and retiring fishers who could be out catching fish.

Is Siberia Melting?

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Last Saturday in Sydney, Alexandra de Blas, one-time ABC Radio National Earthbeat Presenter, told everyone at that conference which I attended at the NSW State Library that Siberia’s permafrost was melting.

According to de Blas this was yet another sign of catastrophic global warming – the end is nigh etcetera.

de Blas had probably been reading New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500):

THE world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world’s least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years”.

The fellow who sat beside me on the Virgin Blue flight to Sydney also told me that “Siberia was melting”. He was terribly worried.

But according to the official Russian news agency (http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050822/41201605.html):

The Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the annual temperature of soils (with seasonable variations) has been remaining stable despite the increased average annual air temperature caused by climate change. If anything, the depth of seasonal melting has decreased slightly.

“Unscrupulous scientists are exaggerating and peddling fears about permafrost thawing and swamp methane becoming aggressive,” said Professor Nikolai Alexeyevsky, Doctor of Geography and head of the land hydrology department at Moscow State University. “Siberia has vast natural resources, oil and gas above all. The article aims to set public opinion against Western Siberia and discourage investment in its industry, oil and gas. They are saying, “Swamp methane poses a global threat, so don’t touch Siberia.” They are deliberately trying to cause panic.

Alexeyevsky says that permafrost has a natural cycle of change, and that it advanced and retreated in the pre-industrial era as well.

Interestingly Russia has a whole academy dedicated to the study of the permafrost (http://www.sitc.ru/ync/ync_eng/ice.htm ).

Who should I believe?

de Blas went on to tell the crowd at the NSW State Library that global warming would destroy the Great Barrier Reef. Now that is plain wrong, see https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000762.html .