Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Muslims Speak Out

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Sydney Lawyer Irfan Yusuf has written an insightful piece about London, and Islam, and the bombings, published today by e-journal Online Opinion,

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3651 .

Yusuf concludes, “The nation that cheered for its cricket team even when captained by one Nasser Hussein deserves to feel secure in the knowledge that its Muslim citizens openly and publicly condemn the perpetrators of these attacks. Muslim Englishmen and women must echo the condemnation of terrorist acts and ideologies already expressed by prominent English Muslim scholars such as Tim Winter and the late Martin Lings. The time to speak is now. Muslims must speak out now.”

I remember a quote from Sri Chinmoy, “It is only human ignorance that wants to control the world. Human love wants to bind the world. Human truth wants to lead the world”.

Online Opinion enables people to ‘speak out’ by publishing the spectrum of opinion on important public policy issues – including the environment.

It is hard to hate, when you are not ignorant.

Terrorism Will Not Stop Discussions

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It is perhaps fitting that I post something from Scotland.

The Scotsman is reporting 12 dead and 150 injured from the bombings in London.

The same newspaper quotes Paul Wilkinson, a terrorism expert from St Andrews University, saying “It is quite clear that a major terrorist attack has been carried out on London. The attack has all the trademarks of the al Qaeda network,” he said.

The timing of the incidents came on the opening day of the G8 summit in Scotland.

Tony Blair says the terrorist attack will not stop the meeting or change the agenda at the summit.

Information on the summit including agenda and summit papers can be found at
http://www.g8.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1097073730902 .

Government Commits $2.3 Billion for Unknown Quantity of Water

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On 27th April Queensland Premier Peter Beattie announced $2.3 billion worth of water projects for Queensland. The Premier said,

“The Infrastructure Plan includes funding for a new dam and two new weirs. We will need more urban and industrial water supplies in order to meet the needs of the more than one million extra people expected to live here in 2026. We will meet the challenges not only by building dams and weirs, but also through strategies including recycling, better management of available water, and demand management.”

My first question was how much more water will the different components of this Infrastructure Plan deliver? This information was not available in the glossy report launched with the announcement (see especially pg 28, table 6).

I wrote a piece for the Courier Mail on this topic, and later a blog piece outlining how difficult it was proving to find out what should be a fairly straight forward information.

Today I received an email from the Minister for Natural Resources and Mines explaining that,

“With regard to the South East Queensland (SEQ) Infrastructure Plan, investigations are taking place on the infrastructure listed in Table 6 and the need timing, sequencing and optimum level of development of these projects will be finalised as part of the SEQ Regional Water Supply Strategy. The amount of water available to the projects will be clarified with the release of relevant Water Resource Plans. The Draft Logan and Mary Basin Water Resource Plans are planned for release for public consultation at the end of this year, while the Draft Moreton Water Resource Plan is expected to be released for public consultation towards the middle of next year.”

The name and number of a policy officer was provided should I have any further queries. I rang the officer, just to check that they really had a costing and a timeline for the dam, the Wyaralong, but no idea what its storage capacity might be. “It is still being modelling. The yield is still being looked at,” he said.

So we have a plan and a budget, all announced with lots of media coverage, but not even an estimate of how much water will be delivered.

Government Payments for Environmental Services

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The Hon. Warren Truss MP (until recently Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestery) gave a speech to the Victorian Rural Press Club in March in which he talked about the recently released ‘Agriculture and Food Industry Stocktake’ and some of the issues facing agriculture in Australia. The speech was big on the impact of changing community values on agriculture including the impact of campaigning by animal rights and environmental groups.

The Minister said that the Stocktake was a starting point for wide-ranging discussion under a newly formed Reference Group. This group was to report back to the Minister by the end of the year with a view to developing a “comprehensive policy framework to build, secure and protect Australian Agriculture”.

The Reference Group has since put out a fairly boring position paper which is very different in content to the Minister speech. The paper is apparently intended “to help focus the discussion”.

Part D of this paper is about natural resource management and seems to promote a lot of ideas that have been popular with bureaucrats in both government and the agripolitics for some years now.

It suggests that ‘stewardship payments’could be a ‘market based mechanism’ for paying farmers for public good conservation.

The position paper suggests that “farmers be paid for their output of environmental services such as biodiversity (for example, the management of wetlands for migratory bird habitats), improved air and water quality and other environmental and public health benefits. To be feasible, incomes from delivery of environmental services would need to at least offset any reductions in earnings from traditional agricultural enterprises that result from changed management practices”.

I know a fair bit has been written about this. But I fail to see how ‘the market’ could effectively operate given government bureaucrats (or government appointed committees) are likely to decide the terms and conditions and have all the money.

I would be interested in readers of this blog providing me with examples and/or arguments that challenges my current thinking.

I intend to make a submission to the reference group that will include some discussion of this issue.

There is more information at http://www.agfoodgroup.gov.au/tor.html.

Wolves in Yellowstone National Park

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This will be my third post in a row with a US theme or author. But I just have to share the photos by Joel Sartore at this site
http://www.joelsartore.com/gallery/index.asp . The ‘fragile nature’ gallery has my favourites but it takes a while to download.

I found his photos after reading an interesting piece by Rick Bass on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park just published by OrionOnline http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-4om/Bass.html .

Correction from David Douglass to Ken Miles

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I received the following email yesterday from David Douglass, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, New York:

Dear Dr Marohasy

The following quote from your web page has come to my attention:

“A good example of skeptics cherry picking is ‘Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation’ by David Douglass, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004, Volume 31, Page L13208).

Here the authors claim to compare modeled and observed atmospheric temperature changes.
A nice idea in theory.
But in practice, the data set which they compare the modeling results against has been cherry picked in three ways.

[1] There are a number of different attempts to determine atmospheric temperature trends. They pick the only one that shows a cooling influence.

[2] The authors of this attempt to determine atmospheric temperature trends have since refined their algorithms, the new dataset shows warming. Their new data is ignored.

[3] They end their analysis in 1996. Had they included the extra data, the dataset would have shown warming.“(end of quote)

You have not read this paper very carefully (attached).

I will comment on your 3 points.

[1] Which atmospheric trend sets showing warming have we ignored? I believe that I have read all of the relevant papers and am not aware of a single measurement supporting positive trends in the troposphere. Please send reference to such papers.

[2] Who are the authors? Not us. You may mean other attempts to analyze the satellite data. If so, then Christy has shown that those attempts are flawed and that the UAH results stand. The UAH satellites only gives us one point. What about the other two independent data sets showing disagreement with the models?

[3] We explained why we only showed the results to 1996. However, we did do the whole range and found very little difference (read the paper).

I do not mind being called a skeptical scientist, but it is not too accurate because the word skeptic as used in the climate debate implies being against.

I prefer just “scientist”. In physics the word scientist, without adjective, has an invariant meaning. It means one who searches for scientific truth by comparing observations against hypothesis — if there is disagreement, the hypothesis is wrong.

However, in this field of climate research there evidently is more than one kind of scientist and adjectives seem to be necessary. If forced, then I choose “agnostic” for myself because I do not know which hypothesis is correct. That is why I am working in the field of climate research right now.

Sincerely
David Douglass
Department of Physics and Astronomy

I have emailed David explaining that the comment was posted by Ken Miles, not myself as he had assumed. And I wrote that I would post his response – which is what you have just read. The comment from Ken followed my post of 18th April titled “Warwick Hughes” and can be read here
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000559.html.

Ken ended with the comment, “Climate change skeptics may say that they are just after the truth, but in the vast majority of cases (I can only think of two prominent exceptions) it simply isn’t true.”

I ask, “Which pot is calling which kettle black?”.