Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Information

Bushfires are Getting Worse

By

“IT is too late to leave, you need to take shelter in your home and actively defend it.”

That’s part of a government warning issued today to residents in the Shire of Augusta-Margaret River in south western Western Australia. Twenty homes have already been lost.

Roger Underwood, Chairman of The Bushfire Inc, an organization devoted to improving the standard of bushfire management in Australia, has been warning of potential disaster for many years. At the organisation’s website, Underwood explains:

“For a 25 year period after the 1961 Dwellingup fire there was a comprehensive fuel reduction program in WA forests that gave us a very high level of protection from serious bushfires. Up until about 1985 the majority of the jarrah forest, for example, was burned by low intensity fires every 5-7 years to keep fuel loads down. After that time, the fuel reduction burning program fell away badly and the area of bushfires began to rise. Now, about half the forest area will support an uncontrollable crown fire – a tragic situation.

“There is a similar situation on private land in the South West of the State. For about 25 years the Bush Fires Board and volunteer brigades carried out a vigorous fuel management program, which maintained low fuel loads in rural areas. When the functions of the Bush Fires Board were taken over by FESA, this program also fell away, as FESA’s prime focus is fire suppression, not fuel management.”

The Australian landscapes needs to be actively managed to keep it safe and biologically diverse. This reality is not understood by many of those currently responsible for the development and implementation of land management policy, not just in Western Australia, but across Australia. This reflects a broader myth within the Australia community that when people are excluded from landscapes they will revert to a natural state, a natural order. But none exists.

***************

http://bushfirefront.com.au/

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/11966054/fierce-bushfire-razes-homes-near-margaret-river/

Climategate II

By

TWO years after Climategate – the scandal caused by the leaking of over one thousand emails detailing correspondence between leading climate scientists exposing conspiracy and collusion including how to stack review committees, exaggerate warming trends, and avoid the disclosure of sensitive information – another batch of emails have been leaked, again from the University of East Anglia and again from the infamous Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth and the hapless Keith Briffa.

According to bloggers and columnists who’ve been up earlier than me and who have already start reading the file: what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism.

The new leaked file of emails, dubbed FOIA 2011, is apparently introduced with comment from the Whistleblower:

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Every day nearly 16,000 children die from hunger and related causes. One dollar can save a life — the opposite must also be true. Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels. Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.”

James Delingpole, breaking new for the UK Telegraph, concurs:

“If you’re going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you’re going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you’re going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Download the emails here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37

Wind farms are useless, says Duke of Edinburgh

By

OLD style windmills dot the Australian rural landscape. They were once critical for pump watering from bores, creeks and dams to tanks to water sheep and cattle.

Wind turbines are a variation on the old theme. There are apparently 3,421 wind turbines in the UK mostly build for electricity generation; two-thirds of these are owned by foreign companies that apparently make most of their money from government subsidies generated by the wind farms.

The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Phillip, apparently disapproves of them.

That’s according to a private conversation he had with Esbjorn Wilmar, the managing director of a leading wind farm company.

Buckingham Palace won’t deny or confirm the conversation. Curious that Mr Wilmar was so keen to pass on the Duke’s views given the Duke is so critical of his business.

Read more at the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-philip/8901985/Wind-farms-are-useless-says-Prince-Philip.html

*************
Wind farms are useless, says Duke of Edinburgh By Jonathan Wynne-Jones

Global Temperature Update to October 2011

By

Dear all. Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter (ca. 1.4 MB) with various meteorological information updated to October 2011:

http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_October_2011.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.

Previous (since March 2009) issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography

Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Box 1042 Blindern
N-0316 Oslo, Norway

How Aborigines Made Australia: Bill Gammage

By

A new book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, by historian Bill Gammage explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.

According to the publisher’s website:

“Early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised.

“For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it.

“With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind.”

This book must challenge the myth of virgin “remnant” vegetation that currently underpins significant land management legislation in Queensland and NSW.

Bill Gammage is a historian and adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.

University Entitlement Must Change

By

THE revelations that Paul Greenfield, vice chancellor at the University of Queensland, has been forced to retire early because of “irregularities” in admission of a close relative to medical school do not come as a shock to many of us who have worked in the Australian university sector for many years (‘Relatively stupid for vice-chancellor’, November 12-13, Australian Financial Review).

Neither does the unsuccessful attempt to cover up the scandal.  Ethical standards in universities have deteriorated alarmingly over the past couple of decades.  I have seen situations where final grades of particular  students at Queensland universities, including University of Queensland, have been arbitrarily changed to accommodate the whims of senior administrators.

I have been a lecturer and senior lecturer at universities for more than 20 years.  These also include Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University.

I have seen practices amounting to selling degrees to poorly qualified overseas students to bring in revenue.  Those at subordinate staff levels who try to intervene or object are dealt with very harshly.

There is a pervasive sense of personal entitlement and lack of accountability among the most senior ranks of our universities that is very disturbing.  This culture needs to change.  A step in the right direction would be for Greenfield to leave his position immediately, acknowledge his failings, and at least provide a public apology to the hapless medical school applicant his relative displaced.

John W. Bearsey
Noosa, Queensland
********************************

Republished with permission from Bearsey, first published by the Australian Financial Review, Letters, November 15, 2011.