Salt

“Unless you’re prepared to redo thirty years of scientific research yourself, the debate on this point [the salinity crisis] comes down to a pure question of comparative credibility,” wrote Professor John Quiggin in April 2004, click here. John Quiggin was suggesting that I had no credibility on Murray River issues because my thesis contradicted “thirty years of scientific research”.

In my discussions with John Quiggin over the Murray River, he has been reluctant to consider the evidence. For him, and many others, it’s been a case of backing the orthodox view, also known as ‘the consensus’.

Anyway, some months ago a producer at Channel 9’s Sunday program contacted me. Nick Farrow said that he had heard that I had information showing that salinity levels in the Murray River were falling, not rising. I sent him a copy of ‘Myth and the Murray’.

Some weeks later I was interviewed by Ross Coulthart, also from Sunday, and in the following video clip, click here, which is an advertisement for this week’s program, I am seen stating that we don’t have a salinity crisis, but rather an ‘honesty crisis’.

Peter Cullen (a Director of the National Water Commission), Wendy Craik (head of Murray Darling Basin Commission), John Passioura (CSIRO) and others, are quoted in the clip suggesting the Murray River is not dying and that the problem of salinity may have been grossly overstated. The television reporter, Ross Coulthart, describes it as, “Misguided pessimism”.

To John Quiggin, who has relentlessly attacked me, and my credibility, over this issues, I say:

Maybe I was just a bit ahead of my time.

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Following is the media release from Channel 9:

Australia’s Salinity Crisis: What Crisis?

The SUNDAY Program
Nine Network Australia
Sunday 28th May 2006 – 9am

Reporter: Ross Coulthart
Producer: Nick Farrow

It’s an apocalyptic story of environmental disaster we all know so well.

The Murray Darling basin is being poisoned by salt. Adelaide’s water supply is threatened, along with some of our most productive farmland – and our beautiful rivers are dying.

It’s a frightening scenario. But is it true?

In this week’s SUNDAY programme, reporter Ross Coulthart takes a look at the real threat posed by salinity – and finds things are going badly wrong in public science.

As Coulthart reveals, some of the claims being used to support calls for billions of dollars to be spent on fixing a ‘looming salinity crisis’ are simply not true.

Salinity is a problem. But it seems nowhere as bad as we’ve been told by environmental groups, government departments and many in the media.

Claims that an area of land twice the size of Tasmania is under threat are false. The reality is a fraction of that. Even top scientists now admit the predictions of a disaster have been exaggerated.

They say this may be because the theory about what causes salinity in non-irrigation areas is flawed.

Worse still, scientists suggest a cheaper and easier solution for salinity problems is being ignored – for very unscientific reasons.

“It’s a disaster for science. It’s a disaster for farmers,” one former CSIRO scientist tells SUNDAY.

Taxpayers have now given Government scientists billions of dollars to spend on efforts to understand and tackle salinity. But how solid is the science behind it?

Watch the SUNDAY Program this Sunday 28th May at 9am to find out.”

And here’s the link to the video promo: http://www.nextgenmedia.com/nine/promo/sunday_060528_vid_300.asx

CSIRO, Australia’s largest scientific research organisation, released a two-part report* last Friday on ‘water’ in the Murray-Darling Basin, a region often referred to as the food bowl of Australia. The icon within this region is the Murray River and salt levels in the river have long been considered an indication of the region’s health and the sustainability of Australian agriculture.

The report reiterates “salinity … as one of the most serious environmental issues in the Basin” and suggests that “stream salt loads” and “stream salinity” will increase. Part 1 of the report is 48 pages and Part 2 is 29 pages but there is only one graph of Murray River salinity and it was drawn in 1988, some 16 years ago. It is computer-model generated and interestingly begins in 1920 even though first recording were not made until 1938.

In my opinion it is both sad and deceitful that the CSIRO won’t show us what salinity levels really look like but instead keeps republishing a dated and misleading graph from a computer model.

Would you like to see what salt levels are really like?

Here’s a plot of yearly average stream salinity from when recordings where first made in 1938:

This graph is based on data that I recently requested and received from the Murray Darling Basin Commission.

A plot of all the daily readings for Morgan, a key site as its just upstream from the off-shoots for Adelaide’s water supply, also shows a downward trend for the last 20 years:

This data was also sourced from the Murray Darling Basin Commission and the last data point represents last Friday, 19th May 2006.

It’s good news that salt levels are falling. But no-one will acknowledge it!

A common ‘excuse’ given for the low stream salinity levels is that it’s been so dry, “It doesn’t rain so much in the Murray-Darling Basin anymore”. But hang-on, a plot of rainfall for the Murray-Darling Basin shows no recent drop-off. The last very dry year was 2002 and that wasn’t unusually dry in the scheme of things.

The graph is from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, click here.

Perhaps so much funding is dependent on the perception that salinity is a continuing problem, and so many reputations have been made on the myth, that there is almost an obligation to repeat the falsehood?

I reckon it matters that CSIRO and others keep misleading the Australian public on this issue. I reckon it matters that the federal government just announced another $500 million for the Murray River on the pretext that river salinity is a continuing problem.

* The reports are titled ‘The Shared Water Resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ by Kirby M et al. 2006 and ‘Risks to the Shared Water Resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ by Van Dijk, A et al 2006 published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, Canberra and prepared by CSIRO Land and Water as part of the Water for a Healthy Country National Flagship Program.

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This Sunday, Channel 9’s Sunday program is planning to feature at story on the Murray River and salinity. I’m hoping that Ross Coulthart from SUNDAY will go beyond the empty rhetoric and show that the emperor has no clothes.

So if you live in Australia, watch Channel 9 from 9am on Sunday.

I’ve written a bit about the Murray River which can be accessed online including an IPA backgrounder, click here, and something for Online Opinion more recently, click here, and for ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint with Michael Duffy, click here. I will in due course do a complete critique of the two-part CSIRO report.

Some time ago I was sent a link to a paper by Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist who spent seven years studying climate modelers at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

Her research findings seem to focus on what the modelers said, without scrutinizing the extent to which what they said about the models, accorded with reality. In particular Myanna found that the modelers were very attached to their models and sometimes confused model output with reality. But it is unclear from her work how accurate the models were – the extent to which they did accord with reality?

Last time I looked I was impressed with the extent to which well known global warming scientist, James Hansen, was still on track with his 1988 prediction (Scenario B) about global temperature increase.

Then again between his Scenario A and C, he was covering a range of possibilities?

But hey, all predictions, made back in 1988, have been consistent with what has been a warming trend over the last 18 years.

In contrast, government scientists who made predictions about salinity along the Murray, in particular the NSW Riverina, got it really wrong.

The following graph shows what the models predicted would be the extent of the problem in the Riverina with, and without, a commitment to catchment and farm drainage plans.

The problem of rising groundwater in the NSW Riverina once seemed intractable. In 1990 123,300 hectares was considered at high risk of salinity because the water table was within two meters of the surface. At that time it was predicted that if the irrigators did nothing, by 2006 228,700 hectares would be lost to salt. If the irrigators committed to a $473 million program with $150 million from the state and federal governments, it was predicted that only 182,620 million hectares would be lost.

The irrigators committed to the program in the early 1990s including the implementation of drainage works often including water recycling systems to reduce recharge to the groundwater and improve water use efficiency.

The actual area now affected by shallow water tables is just 3,758 hectares – this is just two percent of the area that the NSW government thought would be affected under the most optimist scenario.

While I am pleased salt levels have been falling in the Murray River, and that the area at risk of salinity in the NSW Riverina has reduced to 2 percent of what was predicted, I am always amazed at how many people ignore this great news story.

Earlier this week the Australian Parliament’s Senate Environment Committee released a report about salinity. The report reads as though hardly anything has been achieved in address salinity in the Australian landscape.

The report recommends an extension of funding for the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality – a project that began in 2001 with a budget of $1.4 billion. It is unclear from the senate report how this $1.4 billion has been spent.

Senator Andrew Bartlett chaired the committee and has a blog piece on the report here.

The Senate report repeats the finding from the National Land and Water Audit’s Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000 that 17 million hectares of Australian farmland could be lost to dryland salinity by 2050.

Yet various recent reports have shown the 17 million hectare figure to be a gross exaggeration.

As Mick Keogh from the Australian Farm Institute recently explained:

“Increasingly, researchers are concluding that many of the assumptions and much of the data used in generating this estimate were wrong, or should not have been used. There are suggestions, for example, that some State salinity assessments used to calculate the national estimate overstate the current extent of salinity by factors of between three and seven times, let alone the projected future extent. Several of the state reports had no reliable data to base estimates on, and many made assumptions about future groundwater levels – a critical element in salinity assessments – that defy the laws of gravity and science, and are not supported by available data.”

At some point in time, the Australian community and the Australian Senate should accept that farmers have learnt how to manage salt. It hasn’t gone away, but the area affected by salinity is contracting and this is a great news story everyone should be shouting about.

But they are not.

And I am reminded of a comment posted at this blog about the same day the Senate released the report. While Geoff Sherrington made the comment in the context of global warming, it seems much more applicable to salinity modeling:

“Modelers would be prudent to keep their frameworks up to date, with periodic testing and private comparison with others, until consensus is reached that the methodology is scientifically good and all plausible effects are quantified.

Economists should not make predictions until that consensus is reached, unless they like eating humble pie.

If, in my earth sciences past, our company had announced a new ore deposit and given figures for its value to the Stock Exchange that was premature, we would well have ended up incarcerated.

If we got our maths wrong and mined a body that turned out a dud, we could go out of business and on the street. These outcomes instill a certain caution and accountability. Greenhouse modelers who produce premature estimates don’t have the same sword hanging over their heads. Their reward is more likely idolatry from supplicants.”

Certainly the doomsay salinity modelers have received nothing but praise, and the science managers who repeated their predictions promoted including to the National Water Commission, while I am often called all sort of nasty names at the popular blogs including at John Quiggin’s and Andrew Bartlett’s for daring to suggest they might have got their predictions very wrong.

Regular commentator at this blog Ian Mott sent me the following email:

Hello Jen,

We have all grown accustomed to the notion that it is the removal of trees from the landscape that causes salinity. But recent research from the Argentine Pampas indicates that the addition of trees to a natural grassland can also increase the salinity of groundwater flow systems (GFS).

This could have major implications for the management of salinity in the Murray Darling Basin, particularly in rangeland areas where major thickening events have taken place or where existing small clusters of forest have expanded onto grassland ecosystems.

The study, by Esteban G. Jobbagy and Robert B. Jackson, published in Global Change Biology compared 20 paired plots of forest and grassland and found a significant increase in groundwater salinity under the forested plots. “Afforested plots (10-100 ha in size) showed 4-19-fold increases in groundwater salinity on silty upland soils but less than twofold increases on clay loess soils and sand dunes.”

While this study has been limited to planted forest plots on previously grassland ecosystems, the same causal factors are at play whenever forest vegetation expands on grassland. And it logically follows that the same causal factors will be at play when, for example, a 10% canopy woodland thickens to become a 60% canopy forest.

Jobbagy & Jackson have concluded that “Soil cores and vertical electrical soundings indicated that …salts accumulated close to the water table and suggested that salinization resulted from the exclusion of fresh groundwater solutes by tree roots.”

To which the average farmer would say, “Well, they would do that, wouldn’t they”.

The extensive, 1400 plus, rangeland sample plots done by Bill Burrows confirm that more than 60 million hectares of rangeland in Queensland is subject to thickening at an average rate of circa 0.25m2 increase in basal area per hectare. There is a further estimated 30 million hectares in NSW. And there are also numerous landholder reports of properties that had only 3,000 ha of Gidgee in the early 1900’s but have in the order of 50,000 ha today as a result of major encroachment onto grassland.

And this poses an interesting question for the publicly funded anti-salinity industry and the policy arms that have focussed so much public attention on the removal of trees as salinity causal agent. If the lowering of a water table by excess bore irrigation can be widely recognised as a causal factor in increasingly brackish ground water resources, why has it taken so long to recognise that a similar lowering of a water table by the addition of trees can produce the same result?

It certainly invites the question, is there any similar research conducted here in Australia?

Clearly, the political exploitation of salinity appears to be sinking deeper and deeper into murkier water.

Regards,
Ian Mott

Continuing my blog posts on salt …

Mick Keogh, from The Australian Farm Institute, wrote in the Australian Financial Review that,

“Dryland salinity is a challenge that Australian farmers must continue to deal with, and cannot ignore. However, successful future management will require …that all involved reject the crisis mentality, and instead become coolly objective about appropriate responses, which in many cases may be to ‘do nothing’.”

This was certainly not the approach that the National Farmers Federation (NFF) was advocating a few years ago. A few months before the detail of the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality was announced,with the promise of $1.4 billion in funding, the NFF and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) made a claim for $65 billion!

At that time, the bogus dryland salinity audit, claiming 17 million hectares of farmland would be lost to salt, had not been released, but the NFF and member organisations knew its release was imminent.

This is what Wendy Craik, on behalf of the NFF, had to say to the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineers in November 2000:

“NFF’s membership was significantly encouraged to hear the Prime Minister himself acknowledge that compensation and incentives were necessary and key components of any implementation strategy for the National Salinity and Water Quality Action Plan.

Whilst we represent very different interests and viewpoints, NFF and ACF are under no illusions about the difficult choices we will face over the next decades. The sheer magnitude of the [environmental] threats facing us if we do nothing was a driving force behind the establishment of our alliance.

NFF and ACF – having identified the problem and put a figure on that cost, have proposed a five-point plan centred on:

1. a 10 year bipartisan commitment to tackling degradation;
2. national leadership by the Commonwealth Government;
3. a new scale of strategic investment;
4. strong private sector engagement; and
5. the active involvement of all Australians.

The future will be about repair and change to ensure agricultural production is sustainable and our natural heritage is conserved.

So how does the Salinity and Water Quality Action Plan, rate against the NFF/ACF proposal?

Bipartisan Commitment: We believe there has been acknowledgement by all sides of politics that the issues are so severe and pose such a threat to our resource base that action must be taken.

National Leadership: NFF and ACF warmly welcomed the leadership demonstrated by the Prime Minister in putting the plan to COAG and the commitment by COAG to its implementation. The significance of this commitment by COAG must not be underestimated, it is the first time that every leader of a Government in Australia has agreed to play its’ part in an integrated solution to an environmental issue.

A new scale of investment: It is fair to say the Action Plan is not of the magnitude of investment which NFF and ACF demonstrated was required. We believe the Action Plan offers the groundwork from which a long-term, sustained commitment of significant resources must be made.

Our estimate is that, over 10 years, the public contribution required to achieve sustainability targets will be at least $3.35 billion a year, together with an ongoing maintenance program of $320 million a year.

In terms of government expenditure, this represents $3.7 billion per year, over the next decade.

Given that we spend $43 billion per year on the health of the Australian population, is $3.7 billion too much to spend on the health of our country?

NFF believes that all levels of government should commit to increased and significant levels of financial resourcing to deal with dryland salinity.

This will need to be delivered in the form of a variety of incentives and direct investment.

And it will need to be delivered by working with land managers and communities in the transition to new production and natural resource management systems that will combat the degrading processes.

Strong Private sector engagement: Achieving sustainability targets in rural landscapes will require major management and land use changes over the next 10 to 20 years.

We estimate this will require an investment in the order of $65 billion over the next decade. Of which we estimate about $37 billion should come from government.”

The metropolitan media ran with the $65 billion figure for sometime along with interviews from leading conservationists and farmers … both communicating the same message that agriculture had destroyed the Murray Darling Basin, and the Australian landscape more generally, etcetera, etcetera.

At that time I was working for the Queensland sugar industry and I could not believe the damage NFF was doing to the reputation of Australian farmers … my protests fell on deaf ears. The focus was on securing money from the Action Plan, no one seemed to care too much about the long term implications of ‘crying wolf’ and so effectively.

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Postscript

I received a couple of phone calls from bureaucrats yesterday about my recent blog posts on salt. There is concern that problems still exist and that John Passioura’s paper “From Propaganda to Practicalities – the progressive evolution of the salinity debate” is not a completely accurate assessment of the situation. I am always keen to post the alternative perspective as a guest post, but someone needs to be prepared to articulate the case and put their name to it.

And while John Quiggin avoided comment at my post, he did start his own blog post on the issue, click here. Quiggin’s Federation Scholarship at the University of Queensland is on the topic of sustainability and the Murray Darling Basin, so I am surprised there not more interest in what the models have, and have not, accurately predicted by way of water quality and dryland salinity.

The consensus from Australian scientists in positions of authority on the issue of ‘river salinity’ and the ‘spread of dryland salinity’ appears to be crumbling.

As Mick Keogh wrote yesterday in The Australian Financial Review with respect to the issue of dryland salinity:

“Increasingly, researchers are concluding that many of the assumptions and much of the data used in generating this estimate [that 17 million hectares of farmland would be lost to salt] were wrong, or should not have been used. There are suggestions, for example, that some State salinity assessments used to calculate the national estimate overstate the current extent of salinity by factors of between three and seven times, let alone the projected future extent. Several of the state reports had no reliable data to base estimates on, and many made assumptions about future groundwater levels – a critical element in salinity assessments – that defy the laws of gravity and science, and are not supported by available data.
It would be easy to dismiss these criticisms if they were just coming from farmers who have an interest in downplaying salinity.

But increasingly, the criticisms are coming from senior scientists and researchers employed by State and Commonwealth Governments, from University academics, and are contained in official reports and published research findings.”

Mick Keogh heads The Australian Farm Institute and published several papers in the institute’s journal last November (Farm Policy Journal, Vol 2, No. 4) by scientists and economists explaining that previous estimates were a gross exaggeration and that many of the policy solutions funded under the $1.4 billion Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality are seriously flawed.

I have been questioning the figure of 17 million hectares since the Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000 was first published*. I am on record in submissions to government inquiries and, for example, in Quadrant magazine in December 2004 explaining how myths are made:

“…[journalists at The Australian] have relied heavily on the government’s report “The National Land & Water Resources Audit’s Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000” (NLWRA) for information regarding the spread of dryland salinity. The document warns that the area with a high potential to develop dryland salinity (from rising groundwater) will increase from 6 million hectares in 2000 to 17 million hectares in 2050, as reported by Hodge in the Australian on March 17, 2001.

The NLWRA has been widely cited and was used to help secure $1.4 billion in funding through the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. It is therefore worth considering its technical integrity.

Interestingly, the report does not distinguish between what might normally be considered irrigation salinity as opposed to dryland salinity. It determined that areas with groundwater within two metres of the surface are at high risk of dryland salinity. The forecast ground-water levels were “based on straight-line projection of recent trends in groundwater levels”.

Yet no data supports the notion that we currently have a situation of rising groundwater in the Murray – Darling Basin. Groundwater levels in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Coleambally irrigation areas – the regions considered most at risk – have generally fallen during the past ten years.”

I have also questioned claims river salinity levels were rising, and would continue to rise, including in my IPA Backgrounder Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment.

John Quiggin has been scathing of my work on salinity and my daring to challenge “30 years of scientific research”. In April last year he suggested that the debate really comes down to a “a pure question of comparative credibility” and concluded I had none.

What a difference a year can make.

Now some CSIRO scientists are suggesting that their organisation may have got it wrong including John Passioura who wrote in a review paper titled From Propaganda to Practicalities – the progressive evolution of the salinity debate that, “Our only defence against the charge of charlatantism is that before deceiving others, we have taken great pains to deceive ourselves” (Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, Vol 45, pgs. 1503-1506).

John Passioura also commented:

“Remote sensing techniques, especially aerial electromagnetics coupled with good ground-truthing, were revealing great variation below ground in the occurrence of saline aquifers, both laterally and vertically. The methaphor of the ‘silent flood’, the widespread rapidly-rising uniformly-saline watertable that as going to take out millions of hectares of our most productive agricultural land, was therefore being questioned – not by the mass media, who embraced it with the macabre fascination that goes with gothic horror novels, but by experienced observers of landscapes and of hydrographs.”

Those who hate having to admit they might have been wrong, could now argue that Passioura and others are only referring to dryland salinity, not river salinity levels. That salt levels in the Murray could still be, just about to start rising again.

But come on, the boggie man with respect to reducing river salinity, has always been the argument that because of spreading dryland salinity, well, it would eventually find its way into the Murray and river salinity levels would start rising again.

This argument has now been exposed as just as hollow.

Let’s accept, it now appears that I got it right on both river salinity and dryland salinity! I feel vindicated. But I won’t hold my breath, waiting for an apology from John Quiggin or anybody else.

And I suggest Mick Keogh not hold his breath either, waiting for the ABC to correct the information at their websites.

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*It used to be easy to access the Salinity Assessment on the internet but now I just keep finding this ‘summary document’. Lucky I kept my hard copy!