Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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What’s Australia’s Carrying Capacity?

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Mitchell Porter sent me a note some time ago that began:

“There is a thought I had a long time ago when talking with some zero-population-growth advocates, maybe your readership can shed some light on this. They were saying Australia was already near its human carrying capacity, and I remembered reading that Australia has a population of about 100 million sheep. Now granted, sheep are metabolically different from humans in a number of ways, but still, the bare fact that this continent can support that many large mammals in addition to its 20 million humans suggests to me that the human population here could be considerably larger…”

Now I hadn’t got around to putting this information with some information I have some where on numbers of sheep in Australia and how they are a species in decline … so Mitchell took the initiative of posting it at the Wiki:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/wiki/Australian_carrying_capacity .

Thanks Mitchell. You’re hopefully a trend-setter!

Mine Your Own Business: Anti-Activist Film

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Jennifer,

The readers of your blog may be interested in the new anti-activist movie, ‘Mine Your Own Business’. The page loads slowly, but patience will be rewarded with the film trailer: http://www.mineyourownbusiness.org/index.htm .

Schiller.

And this is what the Director of the movie had to say:

“I remember a time, not so long ago, when the man with the sandwich board warning the world that the end is nigh was a comic figure. He appeared in cartoons and comedy sketch shows as the clownish, nerdish figure that others made jokes about.

Similarly it is not long ago that the bearded man, with the religious collar and evangelical zeal, warned us to change our ways or we would be visited by plagues and pestilence was viewed as a throwback to a conservative, less sophisticated past.

Most educated westerners feel that no longer believing these spreaders of doom and apocalypse is a sign of progress and how our society has matured.

But remove the glasses and the grubby raincoat from the man with the sandwich board and replace it with an ethnic shirt, maybe a pair of sandals and write on the sandwich board that we are all going to be damned because the oil will run out, Or maybe the message is that we are all going to be doomed because we have cut down the forests or because of global warming and suddenly we take the man with the sandwich board very seriously indeed.

Similarly remove the collar from the man with the evangelical zeal and make him a member of an environmental organisation and suddenly we start paying serious attention to these modern day prophets of doom.

Once, according to our religious leaders, it was our sins that were leading us to damnation. Now, according to our environmental leaders, it is polluting actions of man that will lead to our damnation.

How little we have all progressed and how we still love to listen to harbingers of doom would be mildly amusing if it were not for the pernicious effects of such beliefs on the poorest people in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil, and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and having what we have. We want them to stay as ‘traditional peasants’ forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.

‘Mine Your Own Business’ will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion-the religion of environmentalism.

Phelim McAleer
July 2006″

George McCallum

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George McCallum is a regular reader and sometimes commentator at this blog. He has been based in Berlin for the last 9 years, working as a freelance wildlife photographer, marine mammal observer, freelance field researcher, chief cook and bottle washer. He also runs his own one man company, Whalephoto.

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George has just returned from the Arctic and is working on the 20,000 or so digital images he has shot this year as well as preparing a poster/paper for the upcoming European Cetacean Society conference in San Sebastian, Spain. The conference is in early 2007 and George will be speaking on the use of flash equipment in low light and backlit conditions.

And George has found time to send us information about himself for the people category at this blog:

“I’ve been an ID photographer/observer on Norway´s whale population surveys since 1995, team leader on same last year, team leader/ID photographer of whale observers on some ecosystem surveys also last two years, also in arctic Norway, North and North East Atlantic areas.

Previous and concurrent to this, I have worked as a field researcher volunteer/ID photographer from both commercial whale watching boats and hired vessels off Andenes in Arctic Norway between 1995-2000, occasionally as a guide on one of the whale watching boats. Also worked as a field researcher/volunteer/ID photographer with T.Simila´s killer whale project in Arctic Norway from 1993 onwards. I also spent a number of winter seasons in Tysfjord working with and for various TV and film crews who had come to Tysfjord to film the local killer whale population as either vessel driver, local expert and once or twice as the subject being a prat for the cameras.

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Its a kittiwake on his head.

I’ve spent 6 months in the Canary islands off the north African coast as a research assistant on a boat studying Short-finned Pilot whales, basic ID work and collecting data on the effects of whale watching boats on the local Pilot whale population.

Prior to that, I studied in Scotland for 5-6 years at University as a mature student. I studying biology, but dropped out before my final year after a few field trips led me to the realization that the field researchers had most of the fun and aimed myself in that direction.

For the ten years before that, I worked as a marine mammal trainer (with dolphins, seals, sea lions, sea elephants, killer whales etc.) for around ten years in various marine parks and establishments throughout Europe.

I’ve also worked as a barman, driven a delivery truck, worked on a farm, trained Macaws, penguins and a herring gull (strange but true) as well as working in a commercial slaughterhouse for 6 months or so.

Other experience includes using pax arms (modified DNA sampling rifles used to take a plug of blubber from marine mammals) maintaining and operating high frequency sonar equipment, conning various sea vessels of various sizes, and trying to fix various bits of equipment in the field when it goes up the creek without a paddle.

I speak three languages fluently and get by in two others and I can stutter around in French.

Hobbies include hassling and being hassled by airport security/airline check-in folk whilst traveling with 25 kg or more of assorted photographic equipment and having a once fortnightly malt whisky tasting session in the best stocked Malt whisky bar in the world in Schoneberg. The bar has over 700 different malts so my journalist friends and I foresee a number of years further research before we can give a final opinion on which is best.

Best regards from sunny 28C Berlin.
George

PS. Have you seen this, Greenpeace taking a pasting again:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/29C5599A-FCD8-4E30-9AD5-5497999ABA1B.html

and this:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/ABC6DFDA-9DE9-4EA8-A269-65EAAB628676.html.“

Thanks George for sharing this information about yourself with us … and for the great images!

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As a reader and/or commentator at this blog you may like to tell us something about yourself. Contributions encouraged please email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com. I’ve just also received some great photographs and information from Walter Starck which I will upload soon with a link to his paper from the recent AEF conference.

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More wildlife photographs at Whalephoto.com.

Skepticism Versus Being An AGW Skeptic: A Note from David Tribe

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The Australian Environment Foundation had its first conference and AGM last weekend.* There was some discussion on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

In my talk I suggested that in the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Al Gore took away the potential for dissent by making global warming a moral issue. I suggested he turned it into an issue of faith.

I quoted Thomas Huxley (a colleague of Charles Darwin) who once wrote something along the lines of “religion is for morality, science is for factuality”.

I went on to suggest that there is no ‘truth’, however inconvenient, that should not be exposed to the blow torch of healthy skepticism and there should be no claim, however morally appealing, that we are not prepared to test against the available evidence.

After my paper there was some discussion about semantics, in particular, David Tribe made comment that it is important to be clear about the distinction between skepticism and being an AGM skeptic.

He made the same point as a comment at another blog post this afternoon:

“This is a good a place as any for me to repeat my view said previously directly to Jen Marohasy that it’s highly important to be clear about semantic distinction between scepticism and being a sceptic on AGW. The later implying you reject well established findings.

I consider that it is part of scientific ethics to always be upfront about the limitation to current data and theories. That is, to know and freely state where certainty and range of precision lie, and to never have to apologise for expecting that, because to fail in doing this do so is professionally unethical.

To demand clearer statements from IPCC about the validity and uncertainty range of their claims is not necessarily to be in disagreement with the validity of parts of their model, but normal ethical practice in science. For example IPCC clearly failed ethically in the hockey stick episode. The computer model has numerous complex assumptions that are empirically unproven.

I note also there is substantial empirical evidence for solar forcing processes whose mechanisms are uncertain. That does not mean I am an AGW sceptic: I want to see those aspects of the IPCC model tested against this recent interesting solar driving hypothesis as it could mean all the CO2 efforts being advocated (Kyoto etc) are completely unnecessary or indeed counter productive.”

Does David make an important point? Most so-called AGW skeptics are not AGW skeptics. They do not deny that C02 causes warming, but rather recognize the limitations of the current data and theories.

In calling us AGW skeptics, are the AGW alarmists suggesting we deny the physics of carbon dioxide based forcing?

So is my recent blog post entitled ‘How to Become a Global Warming Skeptic’ misleading, because while I accepted the label, and encouraged others to nominate for the label, I also explained that I don’t deny global warming or climate change or that increasing levels of carbon dioxide may drive warming.

Should we reject the ‘global warming skeptic’ label? What would George Orwell of said?

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* I’ll do a summary of the AEF conference for this blog in due course and link to the conference papers which should be up at the AEF website by the end of the week. In the meantime you can see some of the photos from the conference at
http://www.aefweb.info/display/con2006gallery.html . Some regular contributors to this blog were at the conference including David Tribe and Walter Starck.

Low Temperatures Over Antarctica

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I received the following note:

“Hi Jennifer,

Tonight the ABC news reported on the large ozone hole over the Antarctic.

On the news, first it was claimed that the large hole was responsible for the record cold weather there. Then that the cold weather was destroying the ozone and causing the hole.

Can you have it both ways?

Cheers, Helen Mahar”

According to ABC New Online:

“Dr Paul Fraser from the CSIRO says the lowest temperatures ever recorded in Antarctica’s upper stratosphere this winter – minus 85 degrees – are the cause.

“It’s certainly the coldest we have ever seen and it requires very cold temperatures to get very significant ozone depletion,” Dr Fraser said.”

And how does this fit with the IPCC global warming projections?

Wyaralong Dam: Water More Expensive Than Desalination?

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By the end of the recent state election in Queensland, the Labor Party was proposing not one, but five new dams and the the Coalition a whooping eight new dams. The Wyaralong dam is being planned for a catchment just south of Brisbane and west of the Gold Coast in the Beaudesert Shire. Occasional responder at this blog Sylvia Else, has done some research, and claims even desalinated water would be cheaper than water from the Wyaralong Dam:

Hi Jennifer,

I’ve been puzzling over the proposed Wyaralong dam. Given the government’s own cost estimates and the estimated yield, and using an interest rate of 7.5% and inflation rate of 3%, I cannot get the cost of the raw, i.e.
unfiltered, water below $1 per kilolitre, even when I assume a life of 100 years for the dam. I don’t know how much it costs to filter water, but Sydney Water charges 46 cents per kilolitre less for unfiltered water, so filtering is presumably reasonably costly.

This appears to mean that bulk filtered water from Wyaralong dam will be more expensive than desalinated water. With Perth’s desalinator capital and running costs, I get a bulk water cost of $1.02 per kilolitre.

It’s true that the only place one can desalinate seawater is on the coast, but it appears that the government’s intention is that all of the water supply systems should be connected together in a network, so desalinated water could be distributed to anywhere that the Wyaralong dam could serve.

So why build the dam? It seems to make no economic sense, even if the wished for rainfall (based on the next 100 years being like the last) appears.

There was a line in the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. When asked why it was necessary to build a by-pass over the top of Arthur Dent’s house, the council official’s reply was “What do you mean, why has it got to be built? It’s a by-pass. You’ve got to build by-passes.”

May be that’s the reasoning being used here.

Regards
Sylvia Else