(We) can do better

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Article by Geoff Brown

Delfin Lend Lease, the developer of the ADI Site, is now promoting its new suburb. It has the appalling name of Jordan Springs (another generic Delfin project with Springs in the name).

Jordan Springs is the 230 ha area of bushland - the now critically endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland - found on the western (Penrith) side of the ADI Site. Check out the spin from Delfin http://jordansprings.com.au/

There should now be a big question mark over this development

There should now be a big question mark over this development with both the NSW and Australian Government's upgrading Cumberland Plain Woodland from Endangered to Critically Endangered. You would assume any development that proposed to clear over 200 ha (there is still another suburb to go at ADI and it is 130 ha) of critically endangered bushland would be struggling to get approval.

Penrith Council recently approved the first 6 ha subdivision prior to the critically endangered listing.

Penrith Council, Delfin, Peter Garrett

They need to be hammered about this issue and reminded they have an obligation to reject developments that threaten critically endangered vegetation. They can easily justify refusal under the Threatened Species Act and the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. Delfin have also got some kind of get out of jail free card from Peter Garrett whereby they don't have to refer their plans to him for assessment under the EPBC Act. This is appalling as any other proposal in Australia that threatens matters of National significance needs the approval of the Federal Environment Minister.

We are meeting with Garrett's adviser next week and will be raising plenty of issues with him about protecting CPW and the Western Sydney Priority Lands. Also the Cumberland Plain Recovery Plan which is a joint State and Federal Govt Plan.

Mark O'Connor's comments are in italics, in the form of a running commentary through Bernard Salt's article.

In "Inconvenient truth on ageing" (4 Feb 2010, The Australian), Bernard Salt, who markets his version of demography to business for profit, writes,

"WAYNE Swan clearly missed a great opportunity earlier this week with the release of the third Intergenerational Report. He referred to the report by the bureaucratic abbreviation 3IGR4, but if the Treasurer really wanted to appear "with it" he should have christened it the iGen 3.0 Report.

The Intergenerational Report is, of course, the government's key reference document canvassing policy options for managing the ageing of Australia's population."

O'CONNOR: Well at least, that’s Salt’s journalistic slant on it. He wants to see the report as about Gens X and Y and the boomers.

SALT: "-- the problem being that from 2011 onwards more baby boomers exit than Generation Ys enter the workforce."

O'CONNOR: This is a claim he keeps making, but like the basis for his claim to be a "demographer" it comes without explanation. He doesn't say whose projection he is using that shows this will begin to be the case from 2011. (Are we meant to take it on his own authority?) I note that a Google search reveals numerous demographers saying that in the USA Generation Y is bigger than the baby boomer generation, and I can't as yet find any saying the reverse for Australia. But ask Bob Birrell or Katharine Betts.

Since presumably the reverse has been the case up till 2011, I would suspect that the imbalance in 2011 will be, even on his preferred projection, very small. And probably it will not increase very fast either -- otherwise he would have laid stress on that. In short, I suspect this is a weak statistic.

SALT: "The issue is not just the number of baby boomers looking for an aged pension; it's the loss of this cohort's contribution to the tax base."

O'CONNOR: Well, by definition retirees tend to retire from higher salaries than young persons joining the workforce are on, but so what?

SALT: "The favoured solution so far to managing this matter has been to grow the worker base, and in this regard ... "

O'CONNOR: I’d have to check if that (wanting to collect more tax) was in fact Rudd’s stated reason back then. He has since offered other excuses, even defence.

SALT: "Kevin Rudd was emphatic on the ABC's 7.30 Report last October when he stated he believed in a bigger Australia, and further that he made no apology for that view. The Prime Minister's comments have sparked furious debate about the sustainability and advisability of future growth."

O'CONNOR: Yes, perhaps Salt has been feeling the heat on those interactive blogs and online letters that now follow the publication of an article. He used not to have to worry about people raising awkward debates re sustainability, water, food, etc because, at least in the Murdocch Press, there was no counter view.

Mark O'Connor is the author, with Bill Lines, of Overloading Australia, of which a new edition has just been launched. The book is about how Australia is suffering from overpopulation. Mark O'Connor will be one of three people putting the environmental case for a small population in a debate with some die-hard growthists at the next Property Council Conference.

The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

Despite our best efforts, there are persistent and common misunderstandings about the rudiments of overshoot and sustainability. Four come to mind:
1. The exponential function. Albert Bartlett is right about that. I can't get people alarmed by lets say, a 2-3% annual growth rate. Like the magic of compound interest, your town can double in population in a mere generation at this deceptively incremental pace.

2. Efficiency paradoxes. People don't understand that efficiencies, outside the context of a steady state economy, by making things cheaper only provoke more consumption and growth. (eg. Jevons Paradox, Khazoom-Brooks postulate).

3. Social justice doesn't solve resource shortages . The integrity of the lifeboat is more important than how the passengers treat each other. Food can be shared equitably between passengers, but if there are too many passengers, the boat will sink. The law of gravity doesn't care about social justice, human rights or human political arrangements. Moral laws, whether handed down by Stephen Lewis, Dr. William Rees or Moses, are trumped by bio-physical laws. Socialists, liberals, federal Greens, clergymen and humanitarians simply don't get it. There ain't enough to go around, however justly and efficiently things are managed or distributed. And economists of course, are equally delusional, if not mad for believing that with some technological 'fix' we can 'grow' the limits.

4. Limiting factors. The weakest link in the chain can bring a society to its knees. It can have everything in abundance, but a shortage in just one critical area can prove its undoing. This to me is the source of this current fashion of assigning "sustainability" to a series of sectors thought to enjoy some independence from others. It is this misconception which I find most pernicious.

Buzzwords

Like the word “green”, “sustainable” or “sustainability” has become the buzzword of the millennia. Corporations and governments of the left or right feel compelled to dress up the most ecologically invasive development proposal or economic activity with assurances that it is “sustainable”. Employed as an adjective it coats the unpalatable with the sweet syrup of delectability rendering the bitter pill of upheaval and damage neutral in flavour. Growth not couched in green psychobabble went down like Buckley’s Mixture, but “sustainable growth”, “sustainable tourism” and “sustainable agriculture” on the other hand tastes like sugary cough syrup. Such is the Newspeak of contemporary growthism, the vocabulary of deceit that promises a new kind of capitalism, capitalism in a green velvet glove, business as usual with apparent sensitivity to environmental concerns that will nevertheless satisfy the shareholders.

Trade-offs or the Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

But even the compromise suggested by oxymoronic terminology does not apparently suffice to satisfy the corporate agenda. As can be witnessed in the tourist industry, economic considerations have achieved a delusional parity in a “holistic” paradigm that sees “environmental” sustainability balanced off against “economic” and “cultural” sustainability. In this three-legged stool model of viability, environmental issues must compete with other “sustainability” concerns on a level playing field with other equally valid objectives so as to achieve the optimal “trade-offs”. This misconception may be termed “The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns”. It is the assumption that would, if applied to the human physiognomy, rate the heart as an organ of equal importance to every other organ of the body when in fact, as we know, a patient can survive with one lung, or one kidney , or a colonoscopy, or brain impairment, but when his heart stops all of these important but ancillary parts die with the patient. The economy is a subsidiary part of society. It is, as former World Bank economist Herman Daly described it, “a fully owned branch plant of the environment. “ We make our living in an economy, but we live in a biosphere.

Environmental externalisation doesn't change Mother Nature's rules

Case in point. Newfoundland politicians were warned that the cod fishery was not sustainable, but they replied that without the cod fishery, Newfoundland’s economy was not sustainable, so the fishermen of Newfoundland continued to fish. Nature replied that what the economy of Newfoundland required was irrelevant, and so refused to yield more cod. In any such contest, nature’s agenda prevails. Similarly politicians and developers want the city of Phoenix, already at 3 million people, to grow even further. Mother Nature’s City Council, however, has set limits to the volume of water available in aquifers. One day folks in Phoenix, together with 15 million other refugees in America’s south east, will discover that any economy without water is not sustainable. The needs and wants of an economy cannot trespass carrying capacity. Nature imposes boundaries. Without clean air, productive soils, replenished aquifers---without biodiversity services---any economy will collapse. And once the environment is trashed, try milking your “robust” economy for tax revenues to buy another one. Yet that is what corporate and government green wash implies. Former social democratic Premier of British Columbia, Mike Harcourt, crystallized this confusion with a classic line of obsolete reasoning, “To have a healthy environment we need a healthy economy.” He does not seem to understand that the environment was doing quite well before human activity arrived to “manage” it. His underlying assumption seems to be that the environment is an externality, a desirable luxury that we can only “afford” once we have achieved economic “prosperity”. This reasoning is equivalent to saying that yes, while it is desirable that I have a triple bypass operation, I must postpone the operation until I can afford it by continuing to work overtime at my strenuous job.

Environmental passengers

Imagine if the officers on board the sinking Titanic claimed that the cabins on the third deck were sustainable because each had a barrel of water, ten sacks of beans, a compost, renewable energy and a water-tight door. Trouble is, they would not be sustainable 5 miles underwater. Every cabin was rendered unsustainable when the Titanic itself was unsustainable after the collision. Similarly, the space shuttle Challenger could have been said to have a sustainable oxygen supply, a sustainable food supply, a sustainable waste disposal system, and a sustainable crew compartment. But one "O" ring was the limiting factor that made the Challenger unsustainable. All the other "sustainable" aspects on that space ship were rendered unsustainable by the explosion that blew the crew compartment away, eventually crashing it into the sea. Until it hit the water, apart from the loss of air pressure, the crew survived in a 'sustainable' compartment. Our economy and our culture are like that crew compartment. They are completely dependent on the health of the environment. Without the estimated $33 trillion in free biodiversity services, we're toast. Trash the environment if you like but the so-called 'prosperity' you achieve won't buy you a new one.

Misunderstanding the structure of the real world

We still believe that we can negotiate with nature on our own terms. We can pursue business-as-usual just by genuflecting to trendy green shibboleths. Government and corporate communiqués are now laced with green-growthist double-talk. Try this from a discussion paper from the Planning Department of a typical Canadian city. Note how it attempts to appease environmental concerns with trendyisms while remaining faithful to the political mandate to keep growing as usual: “Several growth allocation/land use scenarios will...be developed and tested for impacts on various sustainability criteria (financial, environmental, social and cultural).” In other words, there are several criteria for sustainability, and the environment is just one of them. So Mother Nature, stand back. Get to the back of the line and wait your turn until cultural and economic needs have been satisfied.

Hair splitting

Of course, what exactly constitutes “sustainability” is a matter of some debate among ecologists. As one wildlife biologist commented in response to this critique, “Because natural systems are always changing or ‘dynamic’ there seems to be some disturbing latitude in what we consider a sustained ecosystem. What degree of impairment can a system tolerate before it loses the very characteristics that ‘define’ it? The term ‘integrity’ often emerges in these discussions with predictable results. It is much easier to define what constitutes unsustainable or an irreversible change in the system. A boreal forest without fire disturbance is no longer "sustainable"? Or, can forestry be made to replace this disturbance? At what point do we no longer have a boreal forest? This does not at all detract from your argument that clearly shows that without a sustainable natural environment, all other constructs of "sustainability" are meaningless.” A dead planet indeed can achieve an equilibrium, but it cannot sustain life. And this may come as a shock to economists and nationalists alike, but human economic activity, culture, language and customs cannot exist without living human beings.

Sustainability doesn't come in different brands

Even those organizations committed to imposing limits have succumbed to this flawed understanding. An emerging immigration reform organization declares, as one of its aims, “To promote the creation of a sustainable Canada through urgently needed reform of immigration policies that are in the national interest.” Well and good. But then one opinion has it that this proposal “has some merit because it implies sustainability across a number of areas---cultural and institutional as well as environmental.” But mass immigration is not, as Samuel Gompers characterized it, fundamentally a labour issue, nor is it a cultural one. It is not about how many people our economy requires or how many people our culture can assimilate but how many people our environment can sustain. Contemporary culture as we know it cannot survive an ecological meltdown. The nation itself would not endure. When the water you drink is polluted or inaccessible, when the farmland needed to provide food to Canadians after international trade collapses with stratospheric fuel costs, when our exhausted soils starved of fossil-fuel based fertilizers cannot yield crops, when our forests are mowed down and the air unfit to breath, the fact that a lot people in the neighbourhood are wearing strange clothing or speaking in foreign tongues will be of little importance. Cultural “sustainability” in this context will be a mirage. There is ultimately only one “sustainability”. The sustainability of the whole, not its constituent parts.

Tim Murray
February 4/2010

By Brian Spittle
Brian Spittle is also the author of a book about the history of Birchip and life in Australia, A Place for a Village, which you can read on line. Brian was brought up on Birchip and Kinnabulla farms in Victoria, Australia. He was in the Royal Australian Navy from 1939-1949. He farmed with brothers at Tooleybuc NSW between 1949-1956, then took up a war service farm in Telangatuk East Vic 1957-1966. He then went "disastrously" to WA in Denbarker 1966-1970 and was an "ignobly junior" public servant between 1972-1986. "Thence retirement which is what I was really bred for."

Three Questions

Three of the bigger questions in my life have been

Is there a god ?

Will the oil run out ?

Are humans smarter than lemmings ?

God

With an Ulster Presbyterian background on my mother's side we attended the Birchip church my grandfather and his brothers had built. Despite her upbringing our mother smelled a rat, and as the eldest son we two had earnest discussions as to whether the whole thing was just a waste of time. What if there were no god ? Did prayer actually work?

We decided to play it by ear. The minister seemed so confident. No good asking Dad . He knew that no sane person could believe that stuff.

During the war Hitler was clearly evil, the whole world, it seemed so obvious, would have been so much better off if it were coloured pink and safely within the empire. The king seemed sure that if we put our hand into the hand of God it would be 'better than a known way'. We seemed outnumbered and it was unpatriotic to doubt. In the navy we sang 'For those in peril on the sea' with understandable enthusiasm.

After the war I found a wider world and god faded like the smile on the cheshire cat.

Oil

At the age of 10 in 1935 I asked my father 'How long will the petrol last ?'

He assured me that it came from the bowels of the earth, that the earth was huge, and the petrol and the crude oil from which it came would last indefinitely. We were filling cars from pump-up bowsers then, or buying it in 4 gallon tins, so the draw on the bowels of the earth was modest, but in the early thirties we were obliged to put the car up on blocks and go back to horses as 15 pence a gallon was beyond our budget

I was not completely convinced that the supply was limitless but was content to play it his way as he appeared to know everything.

After the war for the next forty or fifty years I was busy chewing up cars, utes and tractors and polluting where the fancy took me and it was only towards the end of the 20th century that it became known to the literate and alert that Marion King Hubbert had predicted the decline of the supply of crude oil in 1956, according to a formula known as the Hubbert curve and the warnings of common sense were justified.

As very little that first world countries consume is not fueled by oil its imminent decline at an affordable price receives too little notice by politicians and even by many environmentalists. Living style, the size of our backyards and and the limits to our showering times will seem small matters when the supermarket shelves are bare.

Population - Are humans smarter than lemmings?

As for population...after the war Mr Calwell invited ship loads of suitably European migrants to swell our numbers from our shameful 7,000,000. He seemed pretty confident and prices were right so we we went along with that. The post war boom carried us all with it, so despite a childhood kept in relative poverty by droughts, grasshoppers, lousy prices and dust storms that shifted much of our farm into the Tasman, nostalgia swept me up into the farming life I had escaped ten years before.

In 1951 a friend lent me a book by William Vogt called 'Road to Survival'. The book was shocking, frank, irrefutable and sobering. I then bought Vogt's next book 'People'; which was more of the same and is still on my shelves. Erhlich, Carson, Flannery, Clive Ponting, Mark O'Connor, Sheila Newman and many others confirmed over the next half century that the obvious was gobsmackingly in your face fact. No books or learned research are really necessary to grasp this simple truth. Any sane amateur, standing at a city corner watching endless streams of cars. or sitting waiting in an airport watching streams of confidently and casually dressed people smoothly using the magic carpet with never a disturbing doubt as to its rightness normality and permanence can fail to get the message, providing they know some history, a smidgin of philosophy and a touch of commonsense. There are too many people already.... and there will be more. Unless, of course, we rise superior to the lemmings and deny the dictates of our genes.

Wordsworth

Wordsworth seemed to breathe a warning......[1]

' The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!'

(The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.')

Notes

[1] Candobetter Editor's note: Wordsworth was writing at a time of the greatest population growth every known, which began in England, with the earth being torn up for coal and people being pushed around by the early corporations, and spewing forth into the colonies, pushing those people around and tearing up their forests and villages, dispossessing and scattering clans and tribes, in what came to be called 'progress' by economists and the third world and colonies by others.

The David Suzuki Foundation should be careful about throwing stones at climate change skeptics

The cheek of it all. Here is the chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, James Hoggan, himself the President of a Public Relations firm, claiming that the debate about the veracity of man-made climate change (AGW) is largely a public relations stunt by industry front groups conducted in community newspapers. The secret of their power, Hoggan argues, lies solely in the ability to hide the source of their funding---the oil, coal and gas industry. Billions are being spent in a misinformation campaign that dwarfs that of the tobacco industry to protect its profits by underwriting organizations like the “Friends of Science” , right-wing think tanks and phony grass-roots efforts that pack town halls and stack meetings with industry employees in a strategy called “astro-turfing”. The result is to create an “echo chamber” of congruent voices that seem to argue that science is just a point of view.

Hoggan, of course, defends the right of people to have a politically incorrect opinion. As does the CBC--- as long as that opinion is not heard by the audience. But opinions are not equivalent to the arguments that meet the standards of a peer-reviewed scientific journal. And as James Prall, a computer network manager at the University of Toronto notes from his examination of his data base of 2,940 “scientists” who have an “opinion” about climate science, yeah or nay, only 14 of the 615 scientists who have published articles in peer-reviewed literature have taken a skeptical position. Yet, Hoggan conceded, on CBC radio’s “The Current” (November 19/09), http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200911/20091119.html that sometimes the scientific “consensus” has it wrong, that science is pushed forward by the challenges of skeptics. The truth, after all, is not a referendum arbitrated by counting votes. The correct “opinion” constitutes a majority of one. Nevertheless, he maintained, he would rather trust the opinion of NASA or the Royal Society over one Tim Ball.

Unfortunately, though, Hoggan laments, the industry’s campaign of falsehood by proxy is working, as the belief in man-made climate change has dropped from 47% to 36% in the United States. To sort out the factual sheep from the tendentious goats, the public must subject climate change scepticism to two tests. They must ask, “What are the qualifications of those making these claims, where is their peer-reviewed research?”. And secondly, “Are they receiving funds from the industry?” These sound like reasonable questions. Too bad they are not put to the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF) and other AGW advocates as well.

Lawrence Solomon, a world-renowned environmentalist author and veteran campaigner against rainforest destruction and nuclear power, makes the point that AGW proponents too, have their vested interests. In fact, he observed, the U.S. government alone has provided tens of billions of dollars for climate change research over the decades, and recently, some $4 billion a year. Energy analyst Richard Wakefield pointed out while skeptics have indeed received some $30 million from Exxon, governments have funded AGW research with $80 billion. Solomon said that as far as research is concerned, “skeptics need not apply”, as for example a Danish proposition that climate change issued from solar activity. The imbalance in peer-reviewed literature reflects the fact that scientists have shifted their research to get funding, and most are afraid of losing funding and becoming a pariah. Can any objective observer not concur that corroborative “science” and congenial conclusions can be bought and paid for, that there is a correlation between research findings and the results that those who funded the research wanted to find? Solomon argues that big money is to be made on man-made climate change, and that even the oil-industry is pushing the AGW model. And as journalist Christine MacDonald so ably documented in “Green Inc.”, big industry is funding environmental groups, as Solomon noted as well.

That is what makes Hoggan’s stance so galling. While David Suzuki has insisted that “corporations have not been interested in funding us----we get it from ordinary Canadians across the country ...and some foundations in both Canada and the United States” (interview on the John Oakley show, Feb. 15/2007 AM 640 Toronto), the truth is otherwise. The truth is that the DSF’s annual report of 2005/2006 alone listed at least 52 big corporate donors, and that such donors include the EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta’s principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including the Ontario Power Generation Employees’ and Pensioners’ Charity Trust. OPG operates 5 fossil-fuel burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants.

The prime question then becomes, who is shilling for whom? If those politicians who deny AGW theory should be, according to Suzuki’s recommendation, “jailed”, should not a penalty of similar severity be meted out to Green Icons who in bald-faced fashion deny the existence of their corporate benefactors?

This is not about whether AGW theory is right or wrong, or what the “science” –however tainted—says. It is about media double-standards and green hypocrisy. In a perfect world, arguments should be judged on their own merits, not on the credentials of those making them or who pays them to do so. But it is the kept leaders of the environmental movement who threw the first stone, and it is about time that someone fired it right back at their glass house. It is about time that CBC-Pravda subjects the Green Pretenders to some investigative journalism, to correlate their policies with those of the corporations who fund them. To ask for example, if it is more than coincidental that the DSF and Natural Conservancy Canada accept donations from corporations like the Royal Bank of Canada but somehow manage to be mute about the manifest ecological damage wrought by immigrant-driven population growth which the Royal Bank shamelessly lobbies for at even more shocking levels? If we are to follow the money trail, let’s follow it wherever it goes. Even it leads to the door of a CBC-anointed demi-god.

Following Gunns' complete abandonmment of its case which has tied up 20 Tasmanian anti-logging campaigners and their supporters for up to five years of their lives, Victorian Greens parliamentarian Sue Pennicuik MLC called for the Victorian Government to introduce legislation to prevent corporations from ever again similarly abusing the courts with Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) suits to harass citizens who organise against their environmentally destructive projects.

Protest outside Gunns 2008 AGM

"More than five years has passed since Gunns issued their terrible writ against the 20 defendants", Ms Pennicuik said. "Now, on the eve of going to trial, Gunns Ltd has pulled the pin and opted to pay out the remaining four defendants, rather than go to trial".

"It is clear now that there was never any chance of Gunns winning in court, the writ was simply a cynical strategy to tie up the defendants in a protracted legal action to prevent them from speaking out in defence of our native forests", she said. "It has been a mentally and financially exhausting ordeal for the defendants".

"Now is time for all states and territories to adopt anti-SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) laws similar to those already in place in the ACT and in US states such as California and Illinois to prevent such an action ever getting that far again", she said.

"Anti-SLAPP laws empower a judge to dismiss a case if he or she considers that the court is being misused for an ulterior non-legal purpose, i.e. to stop protesters from protesting", she said. "Powerful companies should not be able to use our courts to effectively silence community protest or participation in issues that affect their lives".

"I call on the Victorian Attorney-General, Rob Hulls to prepare anti-SLAPP legislation for Victoria to prevent abuse of the court system by corporations in an effort to silence their critics", she concluded.

For more information: Sue Pennicuik 0409 055 875

Adapted from media release originally published as "Gunns case shows we need anti-slapp laws in Victoria" on the Victorian Greens MPs web site, mps.vic.greens.org.au.
See also: "Gunns urged to drop 'Triabunna 13' case" of 3 Feb 10, "Gunns 20 in the dust" in the Hobart Mercury of 30 Jan 10, "Gunns settles with last pulp mill opponents" in the Australian of 30 Jan 10, "Gunns abandons legal chase" on ABC online of 30 Jan 10, "Gunns payout ends case" in the Age of 30 Jan 10.

On February 12, Sheila Newman wrote a blog about Wildhaven which burnt to the ground in the horrific Black Saturday Victorian bushfires last year (see http://candobetter.org/node/1064 ).

Stella and Boof,
before the fires of Black Saturday

Both lost tragically in the fires last year.
Gone forever now.

Those of us who were privileged to have come to know her magical animals through her photos were devastated. It's heartbreaking to think of kangaroos like the following are now gone forever ... and even more heartbreaking to consider the terror they must have experienced while running for their lives and being burned to death.

And worst of all is the pain of Stella and Alan Reid from Wildhaven who must bear the grief for the rest of their lives. It is a tribute to their shining spirits that they chose to pick up and start over, from the ground up. From all around the world, people started sending them donations of money, food and clothing so that they could begin again. For most of the last year they have lived in one big tin shed with a few of the animals who miraculously did survive the fires.

Cooper and Merlot,
an inseparable couple

Kangaroos such as precious Merlot and Cooper who hold each other affectionately most of the time.

Hope, the baby wombat, 12K
Making sure she sort of doesn't share the food

Then there is Hope, the baby wombat, Hope, is around 12k, and sort of shares her food with the Wallabies, Kangaroos, maybe not. You can see from the photo on the right below that she has her feet in one bowl while eating from the next. This is one way of not sharing.

Hope steals the kangaroos' pouches
who have left giving him space!

Hope, the wombat, yep, eating again
Cooper, Merlot, Nigel and Patch along the back

This is outside in the enclosures we have built, it is fenced by four and a half acres of 8 foot fencing. They can run free or stay in the small enclosure in their pouches.

Patch in a perfect pose
One day he will be a big boy

Patch is so beautiful and is going to be a big Kangaroo tall and elegant. He is still only a baby and like to stay in his pouch but does spend time on the grass.

Nigel, when not in our bed,
smiles when he is in Patches' bed

They have 9 little ones on bottles, 3 - 4 times a day. The last bottle is 10pm and first at 6 am.

Says Stella: "It is nearly one year on since Black Saturday, this Sunday is a year. We are at peace here in our world again. For the rest of our lives we will care for the little ones, each year at this time the memories of one year ago will be so strong it breaks our hears as if it was yesterday. This we cannot change, It will be with us forever. To cry and remember is what humans do, it is ok to do this.

Nigel in our bed
When not in Patches' bed

Alice having a bottle, talking and drinking simultaneously
She loves hugs and kisses and gives them back

The Bunker
A safety net for the future

Hope chases Alice
They are good friends

The land is still so barren
But we have hope for the future when things will be lush and green again

Spoiled rotten on the couch.
One happy family

This is our new kangaroo enclosure
Merlot and Cooper fussing as usual

"We look in to the eyes and faces of the little ones in our care and we smile again. Wildhaven will be free and safe again for the little ones. This time many more people are watching, caring and loving we are not doing it alone, this is a good thing. Welcome to Wildhaven where our family and friends are the little creatures of the earth. I hope the years to come you too will enjoy our world as much as we feel privileged to be part of. It is an honor to be part of their world."

We built a fire bunker for our wildlife, and they have taken to the concert tank very easily, it will always be open to them. They come and go in the bunker as they wish. It is inside the enclosure for them. In making our world safe the little ones in our care will always come first. They will not be afraid to go in, when the next fires come.

Hope, the baby wombat, chasing Alice, they are good friends. Hope is a very fast runner, Alice has better eye sight.

Love from
Alan Stella and All at Wildhaven.

And it is an honour to know you too, Stella. Thank you for giving us a glimpse into the beauty and sweetness of Australia's native animals.

They still need help. Any contributions gratefully received at:-

Direct Bank Deposit to:
Stella & Alan Reid
BSB: 063 222
Account: 10262617

Or mail a cheque to:
Stella and Alan Reid, C/- St Andrews Post Office, 10 Caledonia Street, St Andrews Vic 3761, or PO Box 195, St Andrews Vic 3761

Overseas contributions can be paypalled to [email protected] with subject line 'For Wildhaven'.

BLACK SATURDAY POEM
HELL ON EARTH - by Christopher Levinson
(http://cjwriter.com/2009/02/14/hell-on-earth/)

Red sunrise burning
Wind howling amongst the trees:
Nature is unleashed

The beauty of fire:
An unstoppable fury
Dancing in the wind

Eucalypt forest:
Ancient trees of memory
Scorched by angry flames

Smoke clouding the sky:
Embers falling like raindrops
In the darkest light

Twenty years of life
Reduced to rubble and ash:
We have each other

A fallen tree trunk:
Cars abandoned by the road
Toys scattered inside

Amidst the burnt grass
A single flower remains:
A lone miracle

The sadness of night:
Survivors gather to pray
Tears fall down your face

A city of tents:
Shelter and home to many
Memories survive

Red sunset fading
Raindrops falling to the ground:
A young country mourns

Kevin Rudd has expressed his desire for a "big Australia", contrary to public interests, without an independent scientific assessment of our "carrying capacity", and without any population plan or policy.

Australia is already a "big" nation. We have vast sunburnt plains, ancient rocky ranges, rugged coastlines that spread across the horizon, sparkling and pristine beaches, the envy of the world. We have the greatest Barrier Reef, and our biodiversity is one of the richest in the world with many flora and fauna species unique to Australia.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. Its interior has one of the lowest rainfalls in the world and about three-quarters of the land is arid or semi-arid.

Marsupials and monotremes (eg, kangaroos and platypus) are amongst the most well known endemic species. Although 70 species of marsupial occur in South America, Australia has the largest number in the world, with about 144 species.

Australia has the highest biodiversity of seagrasses in the world with 30 of the 58 species existing worldwide present in our marine environment. Australia has the largest uranium deposits in the world, with about 40 per cent of the planet's recoverable uranium resources. Deposits in the NT alone are thought be worth $12 billion. Australia has the largest identified reserves of bauxite, lead, nickel, tantalum, mineral sands, zinc and uranium.

(photo: old growth forest Brown Mountain Victoria)

The tallest reliably documented tree ever measured was the Thorpdale Tree, a Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) growing at Thorpdale in Victoria, Australia. The tree was measured at 112.8m (370 feet) standing and 114.3m (375 feet) on the ground after it was felled in 1884.

In 1995, an extraordinary Huon pine tree was found in Tasmania, Australia. What was thought to be many trees covering 2.5 acres, appeared to be just one tree - a very old tree. Some media reports claimed it could be 30,000 to 40,000 years old, one of the world's oldest trees!

Australia has the greatest risk of bushfires in the world.

In contrast to the "big" things to be proud of, a report by British risk analysis company Maplecroft has found that Australia has overtaken the United States as the world's largest polluter and is now leading the world in per capita emissions of CO2, topping a list of 185 countries!

Our wealth is in our natural heritage, not on numbers of people. What will make a few privileged people wealthy will impoverish our land and the majority of our people. We are not a colony or a territory but a sovereign nation that we need to protect, be proud of and cherish. We don't need more people to have a "big Australia"!

With the global population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, there are now calls to rein in the growth to save the planet.

Deliberate population growth is all about greed and consumerism and a failure to appreciate what is naturally "big" about Australia.

On ABC TV Jan 28th 7.30 report the Australian PM appears to have backtracked on the idea of a "Big Australia" for which he said previously that he would make "no apology"

Are stages of governmental and media spin and treatment of forced population growth akin to the stages of grief-predictable and identifiable?

See also: "Rudd facing a Queensland backlash" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 30 Jan 10, "Rudd cools on a 'big Australia'" in the Age of 29 Jan 10, "Rudd on a 'big Australia'" on the 7.30 Report of 28 Jan 10, "Future Australians could face starvation: Dick Smith" on ABC online of 25 Jan 10, "Population debate needed: opposition" in the Mackay Daily Mercury of 25 Jan 10 (also published in the Shepparton News), "Poll shows Australians do not share rudd's vision for 'Big Australia'" of 10 Nov 09 by Bruce Billson MP, (former) Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities, "Population to now hit 35 million by 2049" in the Australian of 18 Sep 09.

On ABC TV Jan 28th 7.30 report the Australian PM appears to have backtracked on the idea of a "Big Australia" for which he said previously that he would make "no apology".

Are stages of governmental and media spin and treatment of forced population growth akin to the stages of grief-predictable and identifiable?

1. Most of us would be familiar with the 5 stages of GRIEF:
2. Denial (this isn't happening to me!)
3. Anger (why is this happening to me?)
4. Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...)
5. Depression (I don't care anymore)
6. Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes)

With respect to Population growth in Australia , media and government spin goes through stages too but there are twice as many of them as there are for GRIEF ! One could identify them as follows:

1. Denial-Newspaper articles and politicians talking about our population plummeting - whilst all time it climbs -( during this stage maybe 10 years ago whilst driving past a new outer suburban housing estate my innocent passenger exclaimed "but where all the people coming from?"
2. Propaganda and indoctrination - Peter Costello a prime example talking up the population and encouraging a higher birth rate - a sickening article in the Herald Sun last Friday harked back to PC 5 years ago holding 6 babies with a look of glee -reunited with 4 of them the day before, another photo and of course "no apology" in the Rudd-ian sense of the expression.
3. Recognition - Pollie rhetoric and media speak is as though amazed and surprised (after the population supposedly being in "free fall) that the population is in fact rising but no acknowledgement that this has anything to do with government policies or advertising.
4. Convincing - the public that much of what they have always held dear to them about Australia- its democratic processes , its relatively egalitarian and relaxed way of life, has to change to make way for a socially engineered higher population and overcrowding.
5. "Consultation" with the public who is having great difficulty keeping up with changes in the environment and way of life- This stage involves meetings , forums, butcher's paper and submissions to government Green Papers as the long suffering public does the work of government- trying to find the best solutions and the least damaging ways of adjusting to at least twice the rate of population growth we would otherwise have- with no guarantee, no matter how much of citizens precious time and brain power is taken up with these processes that any heed will be taken.
6. Concealment and denial of any part governments play in the cause of the problems that beset our daily lives because of rapid population growth.
7. Garnering expert opinion to support what governments are doing - pushing population growth.
8. Embracing what's happening and what the next generation will have to deal with as though it has some abstract hidden benefit ("I'm in favour of a Big Australia" Kevin Rudd).
9. Underplaying it at a dose just less than lethal (Kevin Rudd says 35 million by 2050 but if the current rate of growth continues it will be nearer to 50 million) to prepare Australian for what will be even worse.
10. Backtracking and backpedaling when it is clear that one has gone too far in force feeding this issue to an unwilling public and in the face of warnings from independent experts. (Kevin Rudd on 7.30 report).

When we reach 50 million and head on to 100 million possibly 35 years later, if the environment has not already totally collapsed we can then collectively go through the 5 stages of grief of the loss of what could have been a beautiful country to live in for both people and wild life.

See also: "Rudd facing a Queensland backlash" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 30 Jan 10, "Rudd cools on a 'big Australia'" in the Age of 29 Jan 10, "Rudd on a 'big Australia'" on the 7.30 Report of 28 Jan 10, "Future Australians could face starvation: Dick Smith" on ABC online of 25 Jan 10, "Population debate needed: opposition" in the Mackay Daily Mercury of 25 Jan 10 (also published in the Shepparton News), "Poll shows Australians do not share rudd's vision for 'Big Australia'" of 10 Nov 09 by Bruce Billson MP, (former) Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities, "Population to now hit 35 million by 2049" in the Australian of 18 Sep 09.

DEVELOPER RULES – URGENT!

WHAT THE ELLS GOING ON?

One rulebook for developer Bob Ells, of King’s Forest/Cobaki Lakes, and one rulebook for everyone else.

Is this right? Are we going to stand for it? What do you think?

4500 lots each Kings Forest and Cobaki Lakes (9000 total) What about the infrastructure, water etc. for such huge developments?

Block sizes from 120m (Normal minimum 450m)

Developer creates own rules for house types, roads, sewerage, etc.

THIS IS OUR LAST CHANCE TO OBJECT

Send submission to:

Dept of Planning, PO Box 39 , Sydney 2001

Fax: 02 9228 6540

Email: [email protected]

IF YOU LOVE KOALAS , PLEASE HELP!

Dear Dept Planning

I strongly object to Leda Development being able to create their own rules for house types, roads, sewage etc. What on earth is going on here? Who is governing this country, developers or politicians? Who is this government serving, the people or the developers?

Why is Leda trying to minimise block sizes from 450m minimum to 120m? This is absurd not only for the environment but also the people who will be crammed together like sardines, 4500 lots with a minimum of 9000 people. Surely this will create a lot of crime in the area?

Leda will not be paying for infrastructure, water, rubbish removal, Tweed Shire council and local ratepayers will and we don't even want another 10,000 people here! We can hardly cope with the traffic and water demands we have now.

What I am most concerned about however, is the wildlife. Round Mountain was the #1 koala colony in Tweed shire and tragically it was totally burned out in a major bushfire a month or so ago. That leaves Kings Forest as the new #1 koala colony and you are allowing a major housing development on it?

What hope do the koalas have? Koalas stop breeding when stressed and many things cause stress - even simple things like having their favourite tree chopped down, or the loss of family members to say nothing of dogs (which will be permitted at Kings Forest), 6 lane freeways (with no overpasses, underpasses or exclusion fences), invasion of habitat. Their main habitat will become the new golf course which of course will be regularly sprayed with neurotoxic organophosphates which also will cause cancer and reproductive problems.

In addition to the threat to diminishing numbers of koalas, there a total of 450 species of native animals on Kings Forest , 33 of which are endangered. Why isn't the government doing something proactive to protect our wildlife? Are you not aware of the fact that Australia has the highest rate of species extinctions on the planet? Wildlife is under the radar of any government department and I would like to know WHY.

By the time people wake up to the horrific loss of biodiversity it will be too late. Humans cannot survive without biodiversity. The best protection is for the government to reclaim land like Kings Forest and leave it for the native animals. Why does money win out every time? What about your children's future? Are you even thinking of what a diminished future they will have with no koalas in Tweed ?

Tweed is home to more biodiversity than even Kakadu yet 2/3rds of these species are at risk of extinction.

Please do something NOW! Stop Kings Forest from going ahead with this madness. Bob Ell is acting like a Frankenstein monster with dollar signs popping out of his eyes and hell bent on destroying our wildlife.

[...]

Sincerely,
Menkit Prince
Uki NSW

Logging is set to start within weeks in a forest that supports the last known koala colony on the NSW far south coast.  There has been a fractious debate between staff from the Department of Environment and Climate Change, which managed the koala research effort, and Forests NSW, the government agency that will manage the logging operation.

The marsupials are listed as a vulnerable species in NSW, but there is controversy over how many are still alive in the wild.

SMH article

Early results showed evidence of koalas at about 50 sites in forest between Gulaga and the Mumbulla mountains.

Based on these findings, the NSW Environment Department issued a statement which described Mumbulla as ''a stronghold of the species'' on the far South Coast.
Timber harvesting in Yabbra Forest near Casino late last year damaged areas used by the highly endangered black-striped wallaby, koalas and yellow-bellied gliders, among several other protected native species, according to an independent report.  A high proportion of trees used by koalas and gliders had been felled and some buffer zones around waterways had been ignored.

Greens MP and south east NSW spokesperson Lee Rhiannon has called on Premier Kristina Kenneally to step in to save a koala population under threat from logging in the Mumbulla State Forest. The NSW Premier should hang her head in shame if she allows the last known koala habitat on the far south coast to be destroyed on her watch, Ms Rhiannon said.

Forests NSW has indicated that logging in Mumbulla State Forest will start early in March 2010.

see the map of the area

According to the Australian Koala Foundation, koalas are in serious decline suffering from the effects of habitat destruction, domestic dog attacks, bushfires and road accidents. The Australian Koala Foundation estimates that there are less than 80,000 koalas left in the wild, possibly as few as 43,000. 

There are four states where koalas occur in the wild - Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia - and each state has its own legislation.

The Federal Government passes responsibility for protection of koala habitat to the states.

The NSW Government first listed the koala as ‘Rare and Vulnerable’ in 1992 and this status was later reaffirmed as ‘VULNERABLE’ within the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995. In recognition of the continuing decline of koalas and koala habitat in NSW, in early 1995, the NSW Government introduced State Environment Planning Policy No 44 - Koala Habitat Protection (SEPP 44).

This is the first state-wide species-specific planning policy introduced by any government in Australia. This Policy aims to encourage the proper conservation and management of areas of natural vegetation that provide habitat for koalas to ensure a permanent free-living population over their present range and reverse the current trend of koala population decline:
(a) by requiring the preparation of plans of management before development consent can be granted
in relation to areas of core koala habitat, and
(b) by encouraging the identification of areas of core koala habitat, and
(c) by encouraging the inclusion of areas of core koala habitat in environment protection zones.

Reported: Two other scat sites were located in Murrah SF that team participants concluded were likely to be koala scat but further analyses were unable to provide definite confirmation of this (B. Triggs pers. comm.). One of these scats, collected at 766574/5955437 could only have been from very young animal if it was from a koala .

Even one koala means that it is koala habitat.  Destroying potential habitat is adding to the threat!

Our relationship with non-human species is ambivalent and there are some species that serve our interests, for resources or companionship, and others that are treated as novelties and thus seemingly without any real purpose. There is so much indifference to Australia's original native inhabitants, and our environment, and our extinction record is the worst in the world.  In the last 200 years nearly 40% of mammal species that have disappeared are from Australia (WWF figures).

With increased urban living, population growth and cultural diversity, we as a society are becoming divorced from Nature and our unique land.  As an aggressive, and arrogance self-centred species, we humans could easily eradicate our native animals, even flagship ones like kangaroos and koalas.  They are all on the extinction trail, and all vulnerable to attacks by humans who see them as no more than vermin or rodents - optional features without any real value that can even be killed for sadistic entertainment or steal their homes for selfish interests.

We as a society embrace the suffering baby koala hit a close range, but ignore the on-going savagery of land-clearing and urban sprawl.  Losing trees makes koalas vulnerable to sadistic humans, stress, starvation and roving dogs.

Koalas should be declared Endangered now, before it is too late to save these world-famous flagship and much-loved animals.

Our governments have hijacked long-term interests in Australia's biodiversity for the short-term benefits of jobs, population growth and profits.

Please contact those below to send your objections:

Department of Climate Change, Water, NSW
[email protected]
Head office
59-61 Goulburn Street, Sydney
PO Box A290, Sydney South NSW 1232
Phone: +61 2 9995 5000

Mr Frank Sartor, MP
Minister for Climate Change and the Environment
Minister Assisting the Minister for Health (Cancer)
telephone: (02) 9597 1414
fax: (02) 9567 0508
email: [email protected]
Address: Shop 3A, 452  Princes Highway, ROCKDALE NSW 2216

The Hon. Ian Macdonald, BA(Hons) MLC
Minister for State and Regional Development
Minister for Mineral and Forest Resources
Minister for the Central Coast
Telephone: (02) 9228 3344
Fax: (02) 9228 3452
Email: [email protected]
Address: Governor Macquarie Tower
Level 36, 1  Farrer Place, SYDNEY NSW 2000

The Hon. Tony Kelly, ALGA MLC
Minister for Planning
Minister for Infrastructure
Minister for Lands
Deputy Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council
Leader of the House in the Legislative Council
Telephone:
    (02) 9228 3999
Fax:
    (02) 9228 3988
Email:    [email protected]
Street Address:
    Governor Macquarie Tower
Level 34, 1  Farrer Place, SYDNEY NSW 2000

Send a letter to Peter Garrett, and our Prime Minister. Click on the link

An opportunity to meet MPs - especially from the South and Eastern areas of Melbourne, with the coming election in mind

Kew Public Meeting Tuesday 2nd February 2010

Kew Cottages Coalition Inc presents "Kew Cottages and the State Election"in A Midsummer Night's public meeting"
with
Rod Quantock, MC

and

Andrew McIntosh MP for Kew John Lenders, ALP MLA Southern Metro Jennifer Huppert, ALP MLA Southern Metro
Andrea Coote MLA Southern MetroDavid DavisSue Pennicuik, Greens MLA Southern Metro

All Local Members of State Parliament have been invited inc:
Andrew McIntosh (Liberal) , John Lenders (ALP), Jennifer Huppert (ALP)
Andrea Coote (Liberal), David Davis (Liberal, Chair. Public Land Inquiry) , Sue Pennicuik (Greens)

The next instalment in one of Melbourne's most contentious Major Projects.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION:

How has the State of Victoria managed to loose $17 million building and selling 55 houses in Kew ?
What will each of our local MP's do about protecting all of the remaining Kew Cottages Public Land if re-elected ?
Do our MP's support the Kew Coalition's Alternative Plan ?
How can the community help ?

Venu:

7pm Tuesday 2nd February 2010

Phyllis Hore Room
Kew Civic Centre
Cnr Cotham Road and Civic Drive
KEW

Melways Map 45 D6

ALL WELCOME !

**
Kew Cottages Needs Your Support !
How you can help
Click Links Below to Preview & Buy Online
Kew Cottages 2010 Calendar
Cards and Pictures

For further information on KCC ENotices please contact:

Brian Walsh,
President,
Kew Cottages Coalition
T: 0414 979 300
Website: www.kew.org.au

OUR (STOLEN) SNOWY RIVER

"Gone are the days
When the Snowy was a river not just a creek.
When the snow water flushed out the entire river.
When the river was deep enough to take large sized boats and ships.
When as a youngster I had picnics on the Curlip paddle-steamer up and down the Snowy River.
When the river bank had several landings to load and unload goods and produce.
When the entrance was deep enough to be safe for all who wished to use it.

The Snowy is just like a ship that has run aground.
Both are no longer able to do what was required of them.

Having lived in Orbost - Marlo all my life
It's a sad sight to see our Snowy water vanish over the hills to the other side."

- bush poem by W. B. Dreverman, born Orbost 12-1-1910.

PS. I have worked in Orbost all my life; moved from Orbost to Marlo during 1965; now retired; my wife and I enjoy looking at the ocean and the Snowy when the tide comes in. During our lives we have seen the Snowy change from a beautiful river to a sandy bottom creek.

Account by Charlie Roberson, born in 1919 at Dalgety:

"I lived one kilometre from the Snowy River for most of my life. We could always hear the Snowy singing from home. That is how I used to describe the sound of the river. It used to be quieter in the summer. Now we don't hear it at all. You wouldn't know there was a river there now.

It was a clear river most of the time, 99 per cent pure. It's hard water now. Before it was soft. The river had a gravelly sandy bed with rocks and boulders but they're overgrown now and you can't see them. During the spring thaw it used to flow for three months at least in a good strong flow, bank to bank. The level used to be up into the first ring on the pylon for that period."

...It was a very popular river for fishing. You could see the fish from the bridge. You could just about get to the river anywhere you wanted with some exceptions. Now you can hardly get to it for the weeds, willows and blackberries. When the river was dammed there was nothing to fish. There was no fish in the dams just after they were built. I have been up there and it doesn't interest me at all, especially when you've spent much of your life fishing the river. It's a different kind of fishing all together. I used to fish at night for native fish. They are all gone now. I gave up fishing when they dammed the river. "

Account by Pip Cogan, born in 1913 at Dalgety and resident 85 years, a grazier:

"The Snowy River was part of my life until it was dammed. I had fished the river since I was a young felloaction against the NSW Government for failing to honour a five-year review of the Snowy Hydro Corporation's water licence. The Alliance is arguing the legal provisions allowing the Mowamba water flow to be increased without compensationary payments.

It is clear from reading the Snowy Scientific Committee's three reports so far that the Snowy upper reaches are sick, despite the $425 million agreement in 2002 by three governments to restore it.

Sacrificed long ago to humanity's needs for hydroelectricity and irrigation water for the Murray Darling food bowl, in drought the river has become so deprived of lusty water flow that its cobbles do not turn over. Its deep pools alienate life forms, forbiddingly hot on top and cold on the bottom.

Last month the scientific committee warned the NSW Government that the limited environmental flows allowed from Snowy Hydro dams provide mere ''life support'' for plants and animals in the river."

The continued demise of the magnificent Snowy River is attributed to the political influence of the long downstream self-interested rice growers, cotton growers and citrus and grape growers, all wholly artifically dependent on irrigation from the Murray River, fed by the Snowy River upstream.

But such exploitive irrigation-dependent industries have powerful political friends like the Australian Government Rural Industries Research and Dever the way that it was and it to look at it today is simply heartbreaking."

Account by Kevin Schaefer, born 1925 at Dalgety, resident for 73 years:

"The Snowy River was a real river. In the spring the river flowed very strong after the snow melt. This strong flow existed for many months, usually from August to November. Whilst the spring was characterised by strong flows, the Snowy River could have heavy flows or flooding any time of the year.

For example the biggest flood in my lifetime occurred in the summer of 1934. All the mountain water came down here. The Snowy River's water was clean and pure. In fact when you drank it, you couldn't get enough of it.

I can remember the years between 1949 and 1956 as being particularly wet, with a peak in river flow in March 1950 when it flooded. The river could rise and fall all year round depending on the rainfall. In my lifetime I never saw the river any where near as low as it has been since the damming.
...I haven't seen the platypus like I used to. You could see colonies of platypus along the river before. Now you're lucky to see one."

The Snowy River Alliance down here in Victoria is right. Australia's most famous wild river, the Snowy River, deserves to have its natural flows restored.

The Alliance argues that if the Hydro schemers release just a third of the Snowy's original flows, its ecology could be restored. But the current life sucking 5% dished out by the Snowy Hydro Ltd corporation is exploitative, selfish and wrong.

The Snowy River Alliance, according to Glenice White of Orbost deep in Victoria's East Gippsland, started off back in 1971 as a reaction to the Snowy's "pronounced signs of degradation." This local community reaction culminated in the Snowy River Interstate Catchment Co-ordinating Committee Report, which outlined the problems of the river and its catchment and made a number of recommendations including that more water was required to improve the river's ecology.

It soon became apparent to the Snowy River community that the Snowy Hydro was steering the river's water to the irrigation agriculturalists down the Murray River, trying to artificially grow rice, citrus and grapes in an otherwise parched hot semi-arid climate. Whereas the much hyped electricity generation in reality became a small part of the operation. Instead of supplying 17% of the South Eastern Grid as the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Authority would want the public to believe, it supplies only 4-5%. The publicity of the Authority is not only misleading but downright wrong."

Since the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme of the 1950s, the choice of water allocation has always been political. The construction of the Jindabyne Dam in 1967 destroyed the 150 year old local community of Dalgety, which had the Snowy running wild through the town. Dalgety's fresh water supply was reduced to a token 1% flow!
The township of Dalgety has not recovered to this day.

In 1996 a report commissioned and prepared by the NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation, Victorian Department of Natural Resources and Environment (now the Department of Sustainability and Environment) and the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Authority recommended that a minimum of 28% of the original flow that passed Jindabyne before the dams were built, be reinstated to the river.

A key perception problem is that Hydro industrialists argue that any water not piped to hydro-electricity or to fill dams is wasted water flow that just runs into the sea. These water industrialists reject the concept of ecological river flows as barbarian.

Then recently, the Snowy River Alliance has flagged the opening of the Mowamba River which is a headwater tributary to the Snowy. Currently, it is captured by a weir where it is whipped away via an aqueduct to Lake Jindabyne.

An article, 'Standoff over the Snowy' by Debra Jopson, 30-Jan-10, (Fairfax media) has highlighted that the Snowy River Alliance plans legal action against the NSW Government for failing to honour a five-year review of the Snowy Hydro Corporation's water licence. The Alliance is arguing the legal provisions allowing the Mowamba water flow to be increased without compensationary payments.

It is clear from reading the Snowy Scientific Committee's three reports so far that the Snowy upper reaches are sick, despite the $425 million agreement in 2002 by three governments to restore it.

Sacrificed long ago to humanity's needs for hydroelectricity and irrigation water for the Murray Darling food bowl, in drought the river has become so deprived of lusty water flow that its cobbles do not turn over. Its deep pools alienate life forms, forbiddingly hot on top and cold on the bottom.

Last month the scientific committee warned the NSW Government that the limited environmental flows allowed from Snowy Hydro dams provide mere ''life support'' for plants and animals in the river."

The continued demise of the magnificent Snowy River is attributed to the political influence of the long downstream self-interested rice growers, cotton growers and citrus and grape growers, all wholly artifically dependent on irrigation from the Murray River, fed by the Snowy River upstream.

But such exploitive irrigation-dependent industries have powerful political friends like the Australian Government Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Ricegrowers Association of Australia, SunRice, Rabobank, Westfarmers Federation Insurance, CopRice, Rice Marketing Board of NSW, Go Grains Health & Nutrition Ltd, Coleambally Irrigation, Goulburn-Murray Water, Murray Irrigation Limited, Snowy Hydro, NSW Irrigators’ Council, Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, the Kondinin (agricultural) Group, Cotton Australia, NSW Farmers’ Association, National Farmers’ Federation, and the Australian Rural Leadership Program, amongst others.

If one visits our Australian CRIKEY website and scrolls down the ENVIRONMENT menu to its current subject listing: 'The case against school veggie gardens'

'The case against school veggie gardens', The Atlantic / Monday, 18 January 2010

Memo, Stephanie Alexander: setting up veggie patches in poor schools may teach kids what organic rocket tastes like, but it won’t teach them to read or help them get a job. More algebra, less arugula says Caitlin Flanagan.

If then one clicks the heading: 'The case against school veggie gardens', one is instantly redirected away from the CRIKEY website to another remote website. In this case away from CRIKEY to 'The Atlantic'

But as a CRIKEY member, I presume CRIKEY content is CRIKEY.
But then I get auto-redirected offshore.

I get:

Cultivating Failure

"Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse
by Thomas McNamee
Penguin
It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation—one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine. The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). The galvanizing force behind this ideology is Alice Waters, the dowager queen of the grown-locally movement. Her goal is that children might become “eco-gastronomes” and discover “how food grows”—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse. Waters’s enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined. That no one is calling foul on this is only one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life, and to make an educational reformer out of someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.

Waters, described by her biographer, Thomas McNamee, as “arguably the most famous restaurateur in the United States,” is, of course, the founder of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, an eatery where the right-on, “yes we can,” ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included. (I’ve had major surgeries in which I was less scrupulously informed about what was about to happen to me, what was happening to me, and what had just happened to me than I’ve been during a dinner there.) It was at Chez Panisse that Waters worked out her new American gastronomic credo, which is built on the concept of using ingredients that are “fresh, local, seasonal, and where possible organic.” Fair enough, and perfectly delicious, but the scope of her operation—which is fueled not only by the skill of its founder, but also by the weird, almost erotic power she wields over a certain kind of educated, professional-class, middle-aged woman (the same kind of woman who tends to light, midway through life’s journey, on school voluntarism as a locus of her fathomless energies)—has widened so far beyond the simple cooking and serving of food that it can hardly be quantified. As McNamee rightly observes, Chez Panisse

is a much larger enterprise than a restaurant. It is a standard-bearer for a system of moral values. It is the leader of a style of cooking, of a social movement, and of a comprehensive philosophy of doing good and living well.

This notion—that it is agreeably possible to do good (school gardens!) and live well (guinea hens!)—bears the hallmark of contemporary progressivism, a kind of win-win, “let them eat tarte tatin” approach to the world and one’s place in it that is prompting an improbable alliance of school reformers, volunteers, movie stars, politicians’ wives, and agricultural concerns (the California Fertilizer Foundation is a big friend of school gardens) to insert its values into the schools. "

...etc, etc...

But I cannot comment. I cannot read other comments.
I am no longer on an Australian website that I can trust.
I think what a cop out and exit.

Am I the only one?
What right does CRIKEY have to outsource/redirect content to its audience without disclosure?

Since when did I ask to be redirected from CRIKEY to The Atlantic'?

This is online deception and fobbing off! CRIKEY is fattening its website content with plagarised material from other websites. It's a case of when 'all care and no responsibility' kicks in.

So if a reader of CRIKEY wishes to comment on an article posted on CRIKEY, that reader is redirected in a sequence of outsourced unrelated websites to an unknown website, which is a deadend, pointless and deceptive.

Crikey! What is CRIKEY? Is CRIKEY downgrading its content to blog outsourcing?

One of the most important principles internationally when referring to greenhouse gas reduction schemes it that the polluter pays. This means that national targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions should be based on the historical contribution of each nation to global emissions.

A most important factor is the levels of emissions per capita. Australia has the highest greenhouse gas emissions per person at 26.7 tonnes per annum and this it twice the average level for all other industrialised countries and 25% higher that per person in the USA (21.2tonnes).

It is obvious that Australia's population growth policies have a enormous impact on our greenhouse gas emissions. Our immigration rate is the major contributing factor of our population growth and thus the biggest contributor to increasing our greenhouse gas emissions, and not "natural" growth. Immigrants coming here therefore adopt our consumption habits and lifestyles, thereby increasing their emissions, and our overall output.

If Australia decides to increase our population rapidly, to 50 million by 2060 or more, then energy-related emission would grow to around 600 parts per million CO2, or about double 1990 levels! (Population Policy and Environmental Degradation Sources and Trends in Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Clive Hamilton and Hal Turton, Monash University)

People are not pollution -- Why climate activists should not support limits on immigration.
People are not "pollution" and neither is CO2, but both can cause problems from excess quantities!
Recently, as concern about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming increasing, the anti-immigrant argument has taken on a new form. Now the argument is: immigrants should be kept out because our way of life is a threat to the world’s environment.

According to the article: To calculate “per capita emissions”, we simply divide a country’s total greenhouse gas emissions by its total population. This provides a useful baseline for comparing countries of different sizes – but it tells us nothing at all about the emissions that can actually be attributed to individuals. In fact, most emissions are caused by industrial and other processes over which individuals have no control. In Canada, for example, no change in the number of immigrants will have any effect on the oil extraction industry at the Alberta Tar Sands, described by George Monbiot as “the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions”.

Monbiot site on Canada

However, Australians have made effort to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, but unless our numbers are limited the gross output will continue to rise. Industry and technology cause anthropogenic emissions, and a higher population increase the demand for larger markets and increased production. More population naturally equates to a demand for more jobs, and thus more industries and more plundering of finite natural resources! Excessive exports are due to human greed and worship of growth.

The Government accepted the findings of Professor Garnaut that a fair and effective global agreement centred on stabilising long-term atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases was at or below 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent is in Australia’s national interests. However, the Australian National Greenhouse Accounts released in June 2009 showed emissions rose by an estimated 553 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 1.1 per cent, in 2008. According to Climate Group, (Jan 2008) compared with 2000 levels, emissions from energy-use were significantly higher across all states, collectively up 19 per cent.

The Greenhouse Indicator Annual Report, released by the Climate Group, measures emissions created by electricity and petrol use across the eastern states. The report shows overall emissions were 5.3 million tonnes lower in 2009 than in the previous year. The base line should be 2000 (Copenhagen) or 1990 levels (Kyoto) , not 2008! So we are reducing our increase?

Australia has declared it will not go beyond a 5 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 without guaranteed action by major emitters including the US, China and India. Little hope anyway of going beyond 5 %! By 2020 the Federal Government wants to cut emissions by 5 to 25 per cent. At our present rate of population growth, our numbers are likely to be well over 25 million by then!

THE United States (Jan 29th) officially stated a goal to cut carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 off 2005 levels, in a submission to the United Nations as part of last month's Copenhagen meeting.

Our 5% is looking a little short now that the US have challenged it!
Kevin Rudd's drive for a "big Australia" and his efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emission are totally at odds, and are completely contradictory and hypocritical to addressing climate change, what he previously called the "greatest moral challenge of our time"!

Wake up Australia...Be Fair !
by Brian Spittle

[A variation on Advance Australia Fair]

Australians all, let us admit
that we were never free
Our soils and wealth are so much shit
(but we do live by the sea)

Our beauty is indeed quite rare
and rather hard to see
So if we must sing let it be
'Live on the periphery !'

Beneath the Southern Cross we stand
but however hard we stare
The cross is lost in a haze of light
cast by the city's glare

The glowing towers which make some rich
pollute the evening air
You migrants lured to share our plains
by all means have a treat
Try living on a desert farm
but don't expect to eat
Camels are our models here
they drink but once a week

Are we so smart ? Are we quite sure ?
that when cheap oil gives out
That when the shortages add up
we'll have the guts to shout
'Come share our boundless bloody plains
we have little else to share !'

Australians all, let us admit
that we were never free.....

About 2,000 tourists are stranded in Peru after mudslides hit the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu.  A Canberra man whose son is trapped by the Peruvian mudslides says the Australian consulate in Lima is proving difficult to contact. A West Australian tourist trapped in Peru says her group has been abandoned by their tour guide as stocks of fresh food and water in town dwindle. They say they were getting little or no assistance from the Australian Government.
Heavy rain triggered the slides and swept away roads, leaving the tourists stuck in Aguas Calientes, a small town near the Inca ruins.
Apart from hiking the Inca Trail, a stay in Aguas Calientes, is one of the best ways to get to Machu Picchu before all of the tourists arrive by train from Cusco.

Climate change impacts:

Peru has the most tropical glaciers in Latin America and has already lost 20 percent of the 2,600 kms of glaciers running through its central and southern Andes in the past 30 years, according to CONAM. (Peru's National Environment Council).  If climatic conditions remain as they are, all the glaciers (in Peru) below 18,000 feet will disappear by around 2015, CONAM's President told Reuters in an interview.

Climatic warming during the last 100-150 years has resulted in a significant glacier ice loss from mountainous areas of the world.  Changes in sediment and water supply induced by climatic warming and glacier retreat have altered channel and floodplain patterns of rivers draining high mountain ranges. 

Temperature in the Andes has increased by approximately 0.1 °C per decade, with only two of the last 20 years being below the 1961–90 average.  By the end of the 21st century, the tropical Andes may experience a massive warming on the order of 4.5–5 °C.

According to a study by Britain's East Anglia University, Peru is the country most at risk to global warming, after Honduras and Bangladesh, because of the proximity of its towns to glaciers and a lack of disaster prevention measures.  The glaciers and lakes specifically are of principal interests to tourists. However, glacial retreat and systems for lake stabilization may be negatively influencing tourism.

Climate change could cost Andean countries US$30 billion per year by 2025, according to a study commissioned by the Andean Community of Nations and carried out by the Peruvian University of the Pacific.  The figure represents 4.5 per cent of the countries' combined gross domestic product. 

The study also predicts that 70 per cent of Andean people will have severe difficulties in accessing clean water sources by 2025. By 2020, about 40 million people will be at risk of losing their water supplies as well as some crops, due to the melting of the glaciers and greater desertification of the Andean mountains.

Because of this geographical mismatch between national water resources and the human population, Peru is estimated to be a “water-scarce” country by 2025 if population growth trends remain high. Peru is particularly vulnerable to climate change because some 70 percent its energy comes from hydroelectric plants, supplied mainly by meltwater from Andean glaciers.

A natural hazard in itself does not necessarily cause a disaster; a disaster results when a natural hazard impacts on a vulnerable, exposed or ill-prepared community.  Destruction of mountain forests or inappropriate farming practices can accelerate erosion and expose land to the risk of landslides, floods and avalanches. Moreover, dams, roads or mining enterprises can be hazardous if not properly constructed and managed.

(Yungay showing the remains of the church spire and palm trees)

Yungay area tragedy, 1970:

Yungay, Peru
In a major catastrophe in 1970, some 25,000 people were killed when a mudslide caused by melting ice submerged the town of Yungay in the central Andes.  The reported death toll from what came to be known as Peru’s Great Earthquake totalled more than 74,000 people. On May 31, 1970, an undersea earthquake off the coast of Casma and Chimbote, north of Lima, triggered one of the most cataclysmic avalanches in recorded history – wiping out the entire highland town of Yungay and most of its 25,000 inhabitants. The 8.0 quake destabilized the glacier on the north face of Mount Huascarán, causing 10 million cubic meters of rock, ice and snow to break away and tear down its slope at more than 120 miles per hour.

It is the image of lone surviving palm trees in the Yungay cemetery that is burned into Peru’s memory. In Yungay, only some 350 people survived, including the few who were able to climb to the town’s elevated step-like cemetery. Among the survivors were 300 children, who had been taken to the circus at the local stadium, set on higher ground and on the outskirts of the town. To this day, a crushed intercity bus, four of the original palm trees that once crowned the city’s main plaza and remnants of the cathedral still stand. In 2000 the government declared May 31 “Natural Disaster Education and Reflection Day.”

(Mountain climbing in the Cordillera Blanca)

Cordillera Blanca's deadly avalanches

Cordillera Blanca
As mountains are often located in tectonically active zones, susceptibility to earthquakes is higher than in other areas. In the Andes, for example, as much as 88% of the mountainous area is susceptible to destructive earthquakes.

Cordillera Blanca glacier retreat since the late-19th century has triggered some of the world's most deadly avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods. Although a Peruvian glaciology and lakes security office has “controlled” 35 Cordillera Blanca glacial lakes, 30 glacier disasters have killed nearly 30,000 people in this region since 1941.

The accumulated precipitation values for November surpassed by 127% the average historic values and, in December, this value has reached 36%.

There are innumerable small to medium-size slope failures that cumulatively impose costs to society as great or greater than the large infrequent catastrophic landslides that draw so much attention. Damage to ecosystems has not generally been documented, but landslides may destroy habitats, for example by blocking streams and denuding slopes.

Lake Paron - looming danger:

Laguna Paron, Caraz, Peru
Currently, the Peruvian federal government has funded projects for the stabilization of 35 lakes that were considered to be the greatest threats to the populations inhabiting the valley below. The construction of tunnels prevents the increase in lake size above the tunnel outlet and dams are used to reinforce the existing, and potentially unstable, moraine walls

Lake Parón is a glacial lake in the Peruvian Andes, supporting a community of 15,000 people.  The people in the area live with the looming danger that, as the glacier above the lake continues to melt, the lake will overflow its banks, flooding the area and possibly killing many in the community. 

Duke Energy (a U.S. company) acquired the rights to control Lake Parón that provides water for hydroelectricity generation.  The community decided to reclaim control of the lake, and in 2008 it did just that.  The community has control of the area but they can't physically get inside the tunnel and change the water flow.  Lake Paron is fed with water derived from several large glaciers, and is surrounded by large peaks.  This lake - above Caraz, in the Northern part of the Cordillera - was once much visited, as it is 90 minutes of travel by car from Huaraz - a major town that serves as the jumping off point for those wishing to explore the region. However, the lake has now been dammed and tapped for hydroelectricity in order to support mining activities, and its has developed the characteristic and unsightly "high water mark" so characteristic of such reservoirs.

While Duke Energy has reaped solid economic rewards for its investment in Huaylas province, the Ancash Department maintains very high poverty levels despite its vast hydro and mineral resources.

The battle over the waters of Lake Parón, in the Northern Andes of Peru, came to a head during the late afternoon hours of July 29, 2008, when over 100 farmers from Huaylas province of the Department of Ancash took over the hydraulic operations of the Cañón del Pato Hydroelectic Center. The farmers were protesting the nearly 50% drop in Lake Parón's water levels following the center's release of the lake's water in order to enhance its power production capabilities.

The licensing of Lake Parón's waters for energy development in 1994 coincided with the enactment of structural reforms under the administration of then President Alberto Fujimori, who sought to attract foreign investment through privatization and pro-business economic policies.

The increase in the peasant population in the Andes area and the fact that, with global warming, it will become possible to cultivate, therefore irrigate, at ever higher altitudes, means that the resources required by traditional irrigation are set to grow and will increasingly be in competition with hydroelectric needs. Thus, even in the highest regions, there will be greater and more intense conflict between different users.

De-vegetation:

A mid-sized country with a large and highly biodiverse forest estate, Peru ranks within the top 10 countries worldwide in deforestation rates, emitting an estimated 127 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
In 1990, the total forest area in Latin America was 1,011 Mha, and it was reduced by 46.7 Mha in ten years (UNEP 2003a). The expansion of the agricultural frontier and livestock, selective logging, financing of big scale projects like construction of dams for energy generation, illegal crops, construction of roads and increased links to commercial markets have been the main causes of deforestation

Re-vegetation on such sites is a slow process, they may remain unprotected against erosion for decades or even centuries. As a result, slope failures, rockfall and debris flow will pose increasing threats to settlement and infrastructure. 

Sanitation and poverty:

Peru’s per capita GDP has historically remained well below the regional and world averages. It is estimated that 18.1% of the population lives on less than one dollar a day, and 37.7% of the population lives on less than two dollars per day. Peru continues to suffer from incomplete coverage of water and sanitation infrastructure. Inadequate sanitation and water supplies was evidenced by the 1993 cholera outbreak that spread rapidly across Peru.  If the national government does not promote the comprehensive management of water resources, then it is unlikely that regional departments will be able to single-handedly implement management regimes, especially in the context of limited funding.

Caring for Mother Earth:

The scientists of Western society have dismissed indigenous people as sentimental  and superstitious and accused them of being an obstacle to development. Paradoxically, those that previously turned deaf ears to our warnings, now are dismayed because their own model of "development” endangers our Mother Earth.

Pervian helicopters are airlifting tourists from the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu where hundreds remained stranded by heavy rains and mudslides that claimed seven lives.

Click image for the same hamster film that is in the teaser for this article.
Or click to go to thewebsite of the impossible hamster.
You can download a file about how long we have to go before, according to the New Economics group, climate change build up reaches tipping point.

Photo by Brett Clifton

In a truly amazing turn of events, Professor Jerzy Buzek, President of the European Parliament and one of the highest officials in Europe, has added his name to a growing campaign to have kangaroo products banned from Europe.

In a letter to the 440,000 campaign director, Philip Woolley, Mr Buzek, who introduces himself as a scientist by profession, said:

“I believe that such actions as yours are important and valuable. Therefore I would like to express my support for the campaign. I wish you success in running the campaign and encouraging as many EU citizens as possible to support this project.”

...
...
...
...
...

“This kind of support is just what we are looking for from caring and compassionate people,” said Philip Woolley, EU Campaign Director for the Australian Wildlife Protection Council (AWPC)

6000 signatures on petition already

Woolley further went on to say: “Since we received the support of the EU President we have been inundated with support from across Europe and Australia. It seems that the world is saying enough is enough. We now have over 6000 signatures from very concerned citizens who are supporting a ban.”

The campaign has now reached the Australian Federal Government who are watching the campaign’s developments with great interest.

The petition can be signed at:- http://www.440000joeys.eu

SOURCE

Further information can be obtained by contacting the campaign office:-
Contact name:-
Philip Woolley, EU Campaign Director / Australian Wildlife Protection Council - UK Rep.
www.440000joeys.eu
T:-+44(0)7595 159235
E:-philip[AT]440000joeys.eu

Click picture for video.

The recent Auditor General's Report on the incompetence of the Victorian Government's wildlife statistics collection and maintenance mean that the Victorian government could not logically have the authority to make decisions about sustainable forestry where local fauna habitat is affected, in the opinion of this candobetter.org writer and environmental sociologist. Because of this, it seems to me that Environment East Gippsland has clearly won its case in advance. It will take years, decades, maybe half a century for the Victorian government to repair its statistical collection. But will the judges be aware of just how bad the government's information is? We have to make sure that they do by making this information so well-known that it cannot be avoided. So please pass the link to the Auditor General's report around.

Brown Mountain Court Case

Environment East Gippsland's (EEG) lawyers are working overtime getting the case and expert witness reports prepared for the court case which starts in just over 4 weeks. It will be at the Sale County Court (Supreme Court does regional hearing). EEG people have been offered some accomodation but could probably use more.

The case could blow out to over the two weeks set aside for it. The forest-related Acts can be complex so loads of paperwork needs to generated. EEG volunteers are still flat chat trying to raise more funds to ensure they can cover the immediate costs. Meanwhile Brown Mountain’s wildlife is getting around the old growth forests in peace. Volunteers are still maintaining spy cameras trying to get more critters on film.

Arrests of Wildlife Warriors

The summer season for protesting by our very own Avatars in old growth logging areas is happening with 5-6 brave and ethical people arrested on summons so far. The forests being targeted have been up in the Bonang River headwaters on the Errinundra Plateau. Currently between 20-30 people at the
camp here in Goongerah. VicForests response is to say protesters have stopped important machinery from being used for fighting fires. This is untrue.

Could I recommend the film Avatar as an example of what our Wildlife and Forest Warriors in Australia are defending and the forces that seek to destroy it? Brown Mountain, as you can see from the photos, has amazing huge trees and is a different and beautiful world. Searching for economic growth through these limpid havens is like searching for Unobtainium. It is a gross act.

Rob Quantok will donate half profits from regional performance to EEG

The very kind and funny actor, Rod Quantock is holding his “Bugger the Polar Bears – this is serious” show at Warrandyte on Sat 20th Feb 7.30. Bless him!

Half the profits he raises will be donated to EEG to help with our costs. Tickets $30. Ph: Ingrid 9870 8378 for details. (will send more details soon).

Help with art-programs needed on website

To help EEG's marketing and fundraising they would love the help of someone who has a good grasp of Photoshop or other image programs – to put a hand and an old growth forest together on their website.

Editor's comment:

Did we all forget again this year to nominate Jill Redwood and Rod Qantok (along with Julianne Bell, Jill Quirk and Mary Drost) for the Australia Day awards? Try to remember next year. Maybe we should have our own awards.

Article originally published on climatecodered.blogspot.com on 24 jan 10.

New research suggest that just two collapsing West Antarctic glaciers could add another half a metre to sea levels this century

The Victorian and Queensland governments decisions to stick to an "upper boundary" sea-level rise estimate of 0.8 metres by 2100 (and NSW at 0.9 metre) for planning purposes needs urgent revision, with new modelling showing two West Antarctic glaciers are past their tipping points.

The 0.8 metre estimate for sea-level rises to 2100 is already obsolete:

• The Copenhagen climate science congress of March 2009 estimated a sea-level rise of 0.75–1.9 metres by 2100
• The federal Department of Climate Change's November 2009 climate update reports estimates of a 0.5–2 metre rise by 2100
• A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December found that global average sea levels are likely to rise by between 75cm and190cm by the end of the century.

So how far could we reasonably expect sea levels to rise by 2100? As the world's oceans warm, they expand and sea-levels rise, but how quickly the loss of polar ice sheets will add to the rise is difficult to estimate, principally because ice-sheet and sea-ice dynamics are not sufficiently well understood, and they are subject to non-linear (rapid and unexpected) changes, such as is occurring with sea-ice in the Arctic. The question is no longer whether the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass (they are!) but if and when they pass tipping points for large, irreversible ice mass loss, and how fast that will occur.

NASA image of Antarctica's warming trends (not actual temperatures) per decade
averaged over the five decades from 1957 to 2006 (both inclusive). For further
information on earthobservatory.nasa.gov web site, click on image.

Recent research by Blancon et. al published in Nature in 2009 examining the paleoclimate record shows sea level rises of 3 metres in 50 years due to the rapid melting of ice sheets 120,000 years ago. Mike Kearney, of the University of Maryland, said it's "within the realm of possibility" that global warming will trigger a sudden collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which could lead to a rapid increase in sea levels like that predicted by the study.

Given the catastrophic failure to date of global climate policy-making (Copenhagen outcome =4-degree rise by 2100), big sea level rises are on the way for the sort of temperature increases now on the table. NASA climate science chief James Hansen wrote in New Scientist that:

Oxygen isotopes in the deep-ocean fossil plankton known as foraminifera reveal that the Earth was last 2°C to 3°C warmer around 3 million years ago, with carbon dioxide levels of perhaps 350 to 450 parts per million. It was a dramatically different planet then, with no Arctic sea-ice in the warm seasons and sea level about 25 meters higher, give or take 10 meters.

The Pine Island glacier, 14 Au6 09

Even more compelling, Professor Eelco Rohling of University of Southampton says:

Even if we would curb all CO2 emissions today, and stabilise at the modern level (387 parts per million by volume), then our natural relationship suggests that sea level would continue to rise to about 25 metres above the present.

Then on 13 January this year, New Scientist published this story showing calculations that the Pine Island glacier in the West Antarctic has likely passed its tipping point, with researchers estimating that this one glacier alone could add a quarter of a metre to sea levels by 2100:

Major Antarctic glacier is 'past its tipping point'

A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.
Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In 2004, satellite observations showed that it had started to thin, and that ice was flowing into the Amundsen Sea 25 per cent faster than it had 30 years before.
Now, the first study to model changes in an ice sheet in three dimensions shows that PIG has probably passed a critical "tipping point" and is irreversibly on track to lose 50 per cent of its ice in as little as 100 years, significantly raising global sea levels.

The team that carried out the study admits their model can represent only a simplified version of the physics that govern changes in glaciers, but say that if anything, the model is optimistic and PIG will disappear faster than it projects.

Richard Katz of the University of Oxford and colleagues developed the model to explore whether the retreat of the "grounding line" – the undersea junction at which a floating ice shelf becomes an ice sheet grounded on the sea bed – could cause ice sheets to collapse.

...

The model suggests that within 100 years, PIG's grounding line could have retreated over 200 kilometres. "Before the retreating grounding line comes to a rest at some unknown point on the inner slope, PIG will have lost 50 per cent of its ice, contributing 24 centimetres to global sea levels," says Richard Hindmarsh of the British Antarctic Survey, who did not participate in the study.

This assumes that the grounding line does eventually stabilise, after much of PIG is gone. In reality, PIG could disappear entirely, says Hindmarsh. "If Thwaite's glacier, which sits alongside PIG, also retreats, PIG's grounding line could retreat even further back to a second crest, causing sea levels to rise by 52 centimetres." The model suggests Thwaite's glacier has also passed its tipping point.

... and now comes a new report in Science that an undersea ridge that may have once helped slow the loss of the Pine Island glacier is no longer doing so ...

Antarctic Glacier Off Its Leash

An unmanned autonomous submarine has discovered a sea-floor ridge that may have been the last hope for stopping the now-accelerating retreat of the Pine Island Glacier, a crumbling keystone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, researchers announced at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

An unmanned autonomous submarine has discovered a sea-floor ridge that may have been the last hope for stopping the now-accelerating retreat of the Pine Island Glacier, a crumbling keystone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ridge appears to have once protected the glacier, but no more. The submarine found the glacier floating well off the ridge and warmer, ice-melting water passing over the ridge and farther under the ice. And no survey, underwater or airborne, has found another such glacier-preserving obstacle for the next 250 kilometers landward.

The Pine Island and adjacent Thwaites glaciers are key to the fate of West Antarctic ice, says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in an e-mail. And West Antarctica is key to how fast and far sea level will rise in a warming world. "To a policymaker, I suspect that the continuing list of [such] ice-sheet surprises is not reassuring," he writes.

At the meeting, glaciologist Adrian Jenkins of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and colleagues described how the instrument-laden Autosub3 cruised for 94 hours along 510 kilometers of track beneath the floating portion of the Pine Island Glacier in January 2009. The sub found a 300-meter-high ridge across the ocean cavity formed by the floating end of the glacier. Deep, warmer water was overtopping the ridge and passing through the gap between floating ice and the ridge top on its way to melting back more of the glacier. That gap has been growing, Jenkins said, perhaps since the 1970s. An aerial photograph from 1973 shows a bump in the ice where the ridge is now known to be, suggesting that the ice was then resting on the ridge and no warmer water could have been getting through.

Although the last physical obstacle to continued melting and retreat of the Pine Island Glacier has been breached, the ice's fate remains murky, says glaciologist David Holland of New York University in New York City. That's because glaciologists aren't sure what got the glacial retreat started in the first place, he notes. It wasn't the greenhouse simply warming the ocean, researchers agree. Instead, shifting winds around Antarctica in recent decades may have driven warmer waters up to the ice and dislodged it from its perch on the ridge. But what caused the winds to shift? Global warming? The ozone hole? Random variability? Glaciologists—and policymakers—would like to know.

... which makes Fred Pearce's prediction (which we quoted in Climate Code Red two years ago, page 47) look spot on ...

Another vulnerable place on the West Antarctic ice sheet is Pine Island Bay, where two large glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, drain about 40 per cent of the ice sheet into the sea. The glaciers are responding to rapid melting of their ice shelves and their rate of flow has doubled, whilst the rate of mass loss of ice from their catchment has now tripled. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot has studied the Pine Island glacier, and his work has led climate writer Fred Pearce to conclude that ‘the glacier is primed for runaway destruction’. Pearce also notes the work of Terry Hughes of the University of Maine, who says that the collapse of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers — already the biggest causes of global sea-level rises — could destabilise the whole of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Pearce is also swayed by geologist Richard Alley, who says there is ‘a possibility that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and raise sea levels by 6 yards [5.5 metres]’, this century.

So much for 0.8 metres being a risk-averse foundation for sea-level rise planning and policy-making.

And for a fuller discussion on the current research on PIG and recent observations, there is a great overview, Is Pine Island Glacier the Weak Underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?" at RealClimate, from November 2009.

David Spratt
24 January 2010

#OtherArticles" id="OtherArticles">Appendix: Other articles from Climate change media to 20 January 2010

Climate change media is a weekly service of CarbonEquity and the Climate Action Centre Melbourne at www.carbonequity.info.

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Picks of the week

World's glaciers melting at accelerated pace, leading scientists
say by Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian, 20 January 2010

From the Alps to the Andes, the world's glaciers are retreating at an accelerated pace - despite the recent controversy over claims by the United Nations' body of experts, leading climate scientists said today.

Climate Denial Industry Blowing Hot Air On Himalayan Glaciers by rendan Demelle, DeSmogBlog, 20 January 2010

The climate denial industry is once again trying to make a huge to-do about a tiny error by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The End of Magical Climate Thinking by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Foreign Policy, 16 January 2010

One year ago, America's president said he was going to start a green- energy revolution. Here's why the Obama administration failed -- and what needs to come next.

Puzzle me this: climate change theory allows no ice age

Ben Cubby, SMH, 16 January 2010 Christopher Walter, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, likes riddles.

Energy & innovation

100 Percent Renewable? One Danish Island Experiments with Clean Power

David Biello, Scientific American, January 19, 2010 One small island in Denmark is technically 100 percent powered by sustainable sources of energy. Could the experiment succeed anywhere else?

German tariff cuts to spark solar sector bloodbath

Christoph Steitz and Leonora Walet, Reuters, 15 January 2010 A potential deep cut in feed-in tariffs in Germany will hit solar companies around the world and increases pressure on large players to reduce exposure to the world's largest photovoltaic market.

A Renewable World: Energy, Ecology, Equality (book)

by Herbert Girardet and Miguel Mendonca

Can CO2 Catchers Combat Climate Change?

Samiha Shafy, Spiegel online, 15 January 2010 While nations bicker about who should cut greenhouse gas emissions and by how much, scientists are dreaming up their own solutions to global warming. A German professor has created a filter which extracts more than a thousand times more carbon dioxide from the air than a tree.

Editorial comment: The process seems cheap and has advantages. Ultimately it relies on storing the captured carbon deep underground, which seems to me to still be problematic. The whole process produces a fifth as much Carbon Dioxide as it captures. This would also represent a cost in non-renewable energy.

Politics & policy

UN should be sidelined in future climate talks, says Obama official

Suzanne Goldenberg and John Vidal, Guardian, 14 January 2010 America sees a diminished role for the United Nations in trying to stop global warming after the "chaotic" Copenhagen climate change summit, an Obama administration official said today.

Why it's wrong to preach "climate justice"

Mark Lynas, New Statesman, 14 January 2010 Two wrongs don't make a right -- carbon is not a prerequisite to development.

Can We Talk Sensibly About The ETS Now?

Tessa Toumbourou, New Matilda, 21 January 2010 The climate deadlock offers new hope of scrapping the worst bits of Rudd's CPRS, especially its extreme reliance on worthless carbon "offsets", writes Tessa Toumbourou

Science & impacts

Radical sea defence rethink urged

BBC News, 15 January 2010 Rising sea levels and more storms could mean that parts of at-risk cities will need to be surrendered to protect homes and businesses, a report warns.

If It's That Warm, How Come It's So Damned Cold? (PDF)

James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo, 15 January 2010

Arctic permafrost leaking methane at record levels, figures show

David Adam, Guardian, 14 January 2010 Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one- third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame

AND

Arctic methane emissions jump

Alister Doyle, Reuters, 16 January 2010

Arctic emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas jumped 30 percent in recent years in a worrying hint that global warming might unlock vast stores frozen in permafrost, scientists said on Friday.

Get ready for seven-foot sea level rise as climate change melts ice
sheets

Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey, Yale Environment 360, 15 January 2010 The IPCC's 2007 report missed out the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets which would be the key drivers in dramatic sea level rises.

AND

The bottom line

Memo to IPCC: Please reanalyze ALL of your conclusions about melting
ice and sea level rise.

Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, 18 January 2010 Good news: The Himalayan glaciers will probably endure past 2035. Bad news: If we don't reverse our emissions trend soon, their disappearance is likely to become irreversible before then.

AND

How the Murdoch press got it wrong on the Himalayan big melt (also published on candobetter.org)

Damien Lawson and David Spratt, Crikey, 20 January 2010 Drawing on a January 13 New Scientist story by Fred Pearce reporting on a debate among glaciologists about the IPCC's claim, The Times (UK) and subsequently The Australian and other Murdoch papers have tried to shift from a debate about timing to a questioning of global warming.

AND

The real Himalayan scandal

Isabel Hilton, The Guardian, 20 January 2010 What's really shocking about research into the glaciers of the Himalayas is how little there has been.

An Ice Shelf the Size of Rhode Island Breaks Up in Just 24 Hours

3 time-lapsed photos show the incredible disintegration of the Filchner ice shelf in Antarctica.

2009 - 2nd hottest year on record while sun is coolest in a century

Skeptical science, 16 January, 2010

The skeptic argument "It's the sun" is both the most used skeptic argument and the most visited page on this website. So with NASA GISS updating the surface temperature record with completed 2009 data, I've updated the comparison between sun and temperature. While 2009 is the second hottest year on record (tied with 2007), solar activity has fallen to its lowest level in over a century.

Psychology, strategy and change

Climate change and its toll on mental health

Joseph Brean, National Post Published: 18 January 2010 Mardi Tindal, the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada, returned from last month's climate change summit in Copenhagen with a deep malaise. Not a true clinical depression, but an anxious despair that reduced her to weeping.

Originally published 22 January, 2010

I wish I could be sure that including what some may see as ‘coercive’ population policies to achieve global sustainability and avoid massive human catastrophes were unnecessary.

For many decades there has been a willful blindness in recognising that human population growth is one of the pre-eminent problems we face. A problem the US-based Population Media Center and other population activist groups are well aware off. A problem that is driving the astonishing growth of fossil fuel use and its depletion, climate warming, bio-diversity loss and species extinction, the growing shortage of fresh water to meet human needs - and as a consequence of these changes – the prospect that agriculture will be unable to produce enough food to feed us.

Together, these changes are the most important immediate challenge to humankind. The threat – still largely unrecognized - transcends all the other problems that transfix our policy makers, says Lindsey Grant, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment.

Most people are unaware that as recently as 1930 world population was barely two billion, not the 6.8 billion now. Almost never do the media portray reduction in human numbers as a beneficial step away from the impossibility of endless population growth.

Population activists point out that increase in use of modern family planning methods rose from 10 percent of the world’s couples in 1960 to 55 percent today and there has been an associated decline in average fertility rates. But they admit many people are still not using family planning and are having large families. Yes, most of the progress made to date on slowing population growth has been done through voluntary means. But will this be enough to meet the population and environmental impacts we are facing?

Funding for population and reproductive healthcare programs, as a share of global health aid declined from 30 percent in 1994 to just 12 percent in 2008. The proportional decrease is due to increasing attention to HIV/AIDS. (World Bank). Global spending on contraceptive supplies and services totaled just $338 million in 2007, considerably less than half what it was in 1995 - despite a 20-percent increase in the number of people of reproductive age in developing countries. (Worldwatch Institute)

Assumption on population growth may also be too low. The UN assumes that our current growth rate will decline, but in many countries, particularly in Africa and parts of the Middle East, populations are rising rapidly, and growth rates show no sign of decline. In addition, a growing number of developed countries, with high ecological footprints have introduced new baby bonuses in the ill-informed belief that encouraging a population ponzi scheme to maintain existing demographic support ratios and retirement pensions is a good idea. The challenge of supporting aging populations is grossly over emphasised by those with particular interests, like the pensions industry. It is a totally phoney argument that we need more young people and more immigration to support a growing number of older people. Young people generally cost society more than older people - in crime, in education, unemployment and many other ways. With typical short-term vision, we forget that all these extra young people get old too and will need support. The media and politicians do not emphasise this.

It is misleading to say that ‘coercion’ or more appropriately, ‘incentivisation’ for the wider good of society doesn’t work and there is no evidence to support the claim. Incentivisation through the tax and legal system DOES work all the time. We accept laws, fines and much more for a stable society and to discourage anti-social behavior like speeding, drink-driving, drug peddling and aggression on others. Try not paying tax and see what the government can force you to do.

What can be more important than saving the future of our planet, for ourselves our children and other species that rightfully share our world? We are already in serious ecological overshoot according to the Global Footprint Network and this is set to get much worse as China, India, Brazil and other developing nations expand their economies, resource use and populations.

The urgency of achieving fertility reductions is clear. A largely ignored UNPD news release on March 11, 2009, warned that if global fertility remains at current levels the world population could increase by nearly twice as much as projected - to around 11.1 billion by 2050. The population of the less developed regions would increase to 9.8 billion instead of the 7.9 billion projected by assuming that fertility declines and a projected 1.28 billion in developed countries. Unless we wake up and take action, it won’t stop there.

If we are to have any chance of moving to a genuinely sustainable world, we have to bring together and consider all the options at our disposal – fully accessible global contraception and advice, education about population impact and its social, economic and environmental consequences and fiscal incentives to encourage fewer births rather than perverse incentives to increase our numbers.

Just as tackling the challenge of climate change requires global action instead of blame chasing assertions that it is the developed world’s emissions that are the problem not the smaller emissions of developing countries that are set to grow their populations significantly, we need global action on population. We will sink or swim together.

The US-based Population Media Center (PMC) has been innovative in its media outreach work around the world and believes the major reason for the success of China's often criticized population policy is that they used intensive person-to-person persuasion that convinced people to comply willingly. Yet some would say this was social ‘coercion’. What could we do if some countries refused to use coercion, leading to endless population growth and resource wars?

Political or religious ‘coercion’ to prevent family planning in countries like Albania, the Philippines, Rwanda and Iran during the early years of the Khomeini regime, led to rapidly increasing populations, increasing poverty, even genocide. Iran has changed policy and fertility rates fell.

But it won’t be enough. In Europe, the United States. Canada and Australia – all places with high consumption footprints, lower fertility is being boosted by high immigration from developing countries and failing states happy to off load surplus populations they are unable to support. Developed countries are under ever increasing infrastructure pressures from immigration that impacts disproportionately on their own disadvantaged communities.

We spend billions of tax dollars every year on aid programs, which in many places have been shown to be ineffective through a mixture of corruption, a bloated and competing aid sector and other factors. Yet the aid industry consistently ignores rapidly growing populations in many recipient countries as a major factor in lack of progress in reducing poverty.

There are already many failed and failing states on permanent food aid – in Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan and more – all highly susceptible to instability and terrorism. Yet conditional aid seems unacceptable to many in the aid industry who would rather bury their heads in the sand. Others argue that aid should go hand in hand with donor governments ensuring countries that receive year on year aid have effective and fully accessible family planning programs in place. It is potentially a win-win situation that squeezes systemic corruption, improves long-term prospects for the countries concerned, supports women’s rights and hopes for a genuinely sustainable and more equitable world.

Japan, Iran, Sri Lanka and Brazil are countries that have achieved replacement fertility levels in a matter of a decade or so after strong persuasion campaigns were combined with readily accessible family planning services. Persuasion is vital to achieve a broad public consensus but political and personal ‘incentivisation’ is also needed if we are to have any chance of a reasonable future.

Ill-informed critics wilfully misinterpret calls for population stabilisation and gradual decline to save the planet as ‘Genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’. It is their ‘my rights only’ and forget the rest of you that is the real path to ‘genocide’ The response from some development and religious lobby groups is disgraceful. Can they not see beyond the end of their noses? The world badly needs a grown-up, rational discussion of the population issue - without blame, abuse and hysteria.

When finite and depleting fossil fuels that have supported massive population growth in the last 80 years, a one-time economic growth binge and an industrial agriculture industry to feed us, run down, the world as we would like to know it will not exist. Alternative energy sources are simply not enough to see us through. We will face chaos and immense social pressures that will be far more draconian than making relatively simple, sensible and sustainable choices now. Have we the intelligence to collectively wake up?

If Victorian Labor is to be epitomised in its wholesale profiteering of Melbourne's heritage, it is the carving up of Kew Cottages 90 acres, which for decades on the prominent Yarra River's prominent hilltop bend was home to Victoria's mentally handicapped, the socially unwanted, the 'too-difficult' vulnerable members of Melbourne's community. It was Melbourne's Bedlam and society labelled them 'mad' and banished them to 'Kew' up on the hill, behind the big wall. Now the Victorian Government is profiting from decades of neglect of many of its most vulnerable.

If Victorian Labor is to be epitomised in its wholesale profiteering of Melbourne's heritage, it is in the carving up of Kew Cottages 90 acres, which for decades on the prominent Yarra River bluff was home to Victoria's mentally handicapped, the socially unwanted, the 'too-difficult' vulnerable members of Melbourne's community. It was Melbourne's Bedlam and society labelled them 'mad' and so banished them to 'Kew' up on the hill, behind the big wall. The State originally called it 'Willsmere Hospital', but long branded by other familiar names like 'Kew Cottages', 'Kew Asylum' and 'Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum'
Historic photo of patients outside Willsmere Hospital

Willsmere Hospital represents a depressing chapter of mental health neglect and abuse in Victoria's history. It was originally constructed in 1848. It soon became the first of three major 'institutions' across Victoria set up to house and care for the diggers of the Victorian gold fields facing health problems and lacking family support to help them.
Despite housing up to 950 odd high-care patients (including children),
Willsmere had been shunned by government for attention, funding and care for decades. It was dark, depressing and Victorian, if not Dickensian.

"There are some bathrooms which would not even rate as car washes, made of concrete and corrugated iron and coldness, where one floor caved in last year; corridors awash with the energy of people out of time; corners out of Dickens, so backward and oppressive.

A shed down the hill by the bitumen where they go when it rains is a cage out of a very old zoo where young men charged with psychosis charge up and down and round and round like angry old bears in a pit. All is lost in these quarters. They stamp the place as a village of the damned. Yes, surely such sights and sounds belong to another planet. Kew is this."[The Age, 1973]

In a special report in The Age newspaper 14th June 1973 by Ben Hills and John Larkin entitled 'The Minus Children' evidence of the systemic neglect at Kew Cottage’s was cited by its superintendent at the time Dr. Gary McBrearty:

"(1) There is a maximum of 48 children in some wards and 35 minimum. What it should be is 20 and 12.

(2) There are four full-time and two part-time occupational therapists. There should be 20 full time.

(3) According to Dr. McBrearty, Kew “is a long way away from a full staff.”

(4) It would be better for Kew to be autonomous rather than its present situation as a small unit in an expanse of bureaucracy.

(5) There are only two psychologists on the staff. There should be at least four.

(6) Wards estimate they need two regular cleaners. At present there’s only one, irregular."

State neglect culminated in the tragic fire of 1996 in which nine young patients tragically died. All the while the pollies have splurged $80 million of taxpayers funds renovating Victoria's Parliament House and $25,000 on a table for the Premier’s dining room.

The subsequent carving up of Kew Cottages has been the epitome of the Melbourne culture of pure immoral greed of government and its chosen developer, Walker Corporation.

In the carve up they are killing and ripping out hundreds of mature eucalypts so they can tightly wedge in as many kit homes (labelled 'townhouses') as they can, to maximise profits, so they can flog 'em off for one or two million a pop. Madness!

Of course the beneficiaries are the Victorian Government, profiting from its neglect of Willesmere and from land sales, along with the Walker Corporation et al., which profit from the kit home sales. Everyone else loses out.

Kew loses out with increased congestion. The trees lose out. We lose the trees. Melbourne's skyline loses out. Kew's landmark hill is set to emulate the industrial density of nearby Richmond - overpriced modular townhouses with the , DKO, told to pack 'em in as tight as you can and kid the buyers they look 'St Kilda-Elwood style'.

Of course the Willsmere patients lose out AGAIN. They've been rebranded 'residents' and either wedged into tighter barracks or re-located ('banished').

Does the pocketing developer-company, in bed with Spring (Grub) Street, give a toss?
This era for Victoria is Brumby's Bulemia, which history will acknowledge as a time of mad social disorder, destruction of Melbourne's heritage, and the perpetuation of Melbourne's 'haves' and 'have nots'.

The history of the treatment of mental health by the Victorian Government and indeed by state governments across Australia has been deplorable and Dickensian. Then after the David Richmond Report of 1983 found systematic institutional abuse of patients and recommended moving people out of psychiatric wards to be cared for in the community, 'deinstitutionalisation', has simply replaced abuse with abandonment and land-speculation with ideology.

Willsmere Hospital, along with many instititions for the mentally ill, was has been progressively reduced in size, and their services provided by general hospitals, supported accommodation, hostels and even gaols. Again, our most vulnerable put in government's too hard basket. Instead of providing acute care, governments have focused on cost cutting and land sales, like Kew Cottages.

The problem is not confined to Victoria. In NSW hospitals, 60 per cent of doctors said they felt pressured to prematurely discharge those with a mental illness because of bed shortages, and almost 70 per cent had been unable to get a bed for a patient with a mental illness in the previous three months.

"The sheer volume is extraordinary ... We paid the price some time ago for this change in direction of taking care outside of institutions and into the community," says Paul Preisz, a senior staff specialist in the St Vincent's emergency department.

"We don't have anywhere to send the patients."

"From the past year alone I can relate stories of people with mental illness sleeping on the floors of our hospitals or being locked in small seclusion rooms, in worse conditions than a jail cell, for days at a time," says psychiatric nurse Toby Raeburn.

NSW prisons are now de facto psychiatric institutions. Government figures indicate that 78 per cent of male prisoners and 90 per cent of female prisoners experienced a psychiatric disorder in the year before they went into jail. ['Out of Mind', SMH, 12 Feb 2005].

While the Victorian Government may have ripped down the long high brick wall around Kew Cottages to open it up to the community for housing, it has retained a shroud of avoidance around the mental health problem in our society.

The Victorian Government has illegitimately profited from its decades of neglect of mental health responsibilities and then has profited from selling public land set aside for mental health care. It has immorally encouraged new investors in Kew Cottages to effectively displace our mentally ill, many of whom now have nowhere to go.

Let’s talk about the national anthem: We do not have boundless plains to share!

Australia’s national anthem is outdated,
incorrect and should be changed according to the environment group Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).

National President of SPA, Sandra Kanck, says “If we pause on Australia Day to reflect on our identity, our thoughts should turn to reforming the anthem. It is an absolute nonsense to say that this continent has boundless plains to share, as is claimed in the second verse of the anthem.

“This is deceptive advertising,” she says. “Anyone one enquiring about the offer might find their choice was between the Hay Plain and the Nullarbor Plain.

“Our soil is not golden – it is in fact old, thin and lacking fertility. Every dust-storm blows more precious top-soil out to sea. Only six percent of our land is arable, and we are progressively building over much of that six percent.

“If we ever did have an abundance of ‘nature’s gifts’ we have made a mockery of them with our shocking record on mammal extinctions.

“We have so little respect for the seas with which we are ‘girt’ that we pollute them with run-off, and within those same seas we are overfishing towards extinction of the marine life.

“We have so little regard for this land that we have overloaded it with human beings. Hence, we are fast destroying our rivers and forests and reducing our biodiversity.

“Reflecting on the words of our national anthem might help us take stock and recognise what has already been destroyed, and what might be saved.

“But we cannot in conscience continue to sing these words with any pride because so many of them are untrue.

“If we continue using Advance Australia Fair then we must at least change the line ‘We’ve boundless plains to share’. Boundless they may be, but with no shade and temperatures above 45 degrees in summer, no water, and empty salt pans that deceptively look like lakes on our maps, these plains are not habitable.

“Let’s have a national anthem that reflects our aspirations and that sings of Australia’s unique natural assets but, also, let’s not lie to the world about their nature” said Ms Kanck.

Email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire (Sydney)on 24 January 2010.
Alison is due to receive an Australia Day award. Candobetter knows nothing about Alison; we just published this letter because it came from a reliable source. We would like to know more and to have a picture of Alison if possible.

Hell in Haiti

Hi mum and dad,

I won't be around when they announce my award on January 26th. I am with Sean Penn, Diana Jenkins, Oscar and 15 doctors embedded in the 82 Airborne ( USA) Dante would describe it as hell here. There is no food and water and hundreds dying daily. The aid is all bottlenecked and not reaching here. The other day I assisted with amputation (holding them down) while they used a saw to cut a young boys leg off with no pain killers. Today I went with a strike force and army patrol in hummers into the streets and walked 5 miles through the camps set up on every street corner. Sewage and bodies stench is everywhere. As I attend to a patient 30 people crowd around me and it's hard to breath. I nearly fainted today as the sewage smell went straight down my throat. I went white and dizzy but couldn't sit down as sewage is running through the streets. There is much infection and it feels like the job is too big. No antibiotics anywhere.

Good news, today our new york doctors evacuated 18 patients with spinal injuries out to Miami and we're all so excited. Our mash unit is in the 82 air base overlooking a refugee camp of over 50000 people. The refugees start singing Christian songs at 4 am and line up for food until the army hands it out at 8 am. (That's if there is any food).

On the first night I was in the nearby jungle camping under the stars with my team and woke up to the beautiful music drawing me to them. I thought it was a church and we went to find it and came across the 82 Airborne camp and the refugee camp. (That's how we ended up here) as it wasn't safe to stay where we were even though we had our own security force. We are totally self sufficent with food, gas and medicines and have a private donor (Diana Jenkins who was a refugee in camps in Bosnia as a child - her family died of starvation in the camps. ) Sean Penn is here purely as a volunteer and is cutting through bureaucracy to get aid moving and food water and medicines to the people. There is no agenda but to save lives. Helicopters fly over head and it feels like Vietnam. That night 50,000 people sung me to sleep and they sing every night for the world to save them. There is always hope but she's not here right now.

Alison xxx

My writing is a mess as it's on iPhone and keeps changing my words and the generator is on for a few hours but I know it's important to tell the world. Please send to any press who may call or family and friends.

Australia Day Award update

Ms Alison THOMPSON of Cronulla NSW 2230 today (26 January 2010) received the Order of Australia for service to humanitarian aid, particularly the people of the Peraliya region of Sri Lanka following the Boxing Day
2004 Tsunami.

SOURCE:

This was sent to me by the Women On Boards list, with the following message:
"It is rare that Women on Boards publicises a cause, however the following email is from a woman who will be in tomorrows' Australia Day Honours List - and is a sobering reminder of our very great fortune to live in this country. Please pass it on if you wish."

Candobetter Ed: I have edited some typos out and put in a bit of punctuation.

...

Are troops what Haiti needs?

In the above news item, "Are Troops what Haiti needs?" Produced by Jesse Freeston, Reporter Ansel Herz says, "At one of the hospitals in Haiti that was not crushed there are basically just a few Haitian doctors there Haitian Red Cross then a team of French doctors probably about seven of them ... They're basically treating like one or two people at a time... They're poorly equipped. They don't have all the supplies that they need. ..There are hundreds of people outside this hospital in tents, waiting for some kind of care, many of them have been there for days." (Ed. There were similar reports on the French news a few days ago, and also that the US forces were more or less controlling the one airport and stopping other nations from helping the Haitians.) Ansel Herz also comments on the hyping of looting themes broadcast by mainstream news in Britain, with pictures showing two men trying to get items out of a collapsed building. He says that he has not seen any looting and that people are trying to find food and are sharing it with each other.

After the earthquake in Haiti, America is seen coming to the aid of the Haitians, with its mighty military power, although aid has been sent, it is not getting through to the people, which may be purposely done to plunge Haiti into rioting and looting that will need the U.S. soldiers to step in and declare military rule. This will be the prelude to yet another puppet government put into place to serve the U.S. Imperialists.

Disaster Capitalism and the Shock Doctrine

The clip above is of Naomi Klein talking about "disaster capitalism" as described in her book, The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine or 'disaster capitalism' has been observed many times before. (See review of Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine here.)

After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened. After 9/11 The White house passed the patriot act.

These events are examples of the shock doctrine: using the public's disorientation following massive collective shocks - wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy, which advantages the US and its major financial organisations and corporations. Conditions are imposed, such as the selling off of publicly owned water and power to private companies when people who would normally unite to resist this are unable to organise against it due to fighting for their lives against a natural disaster.

The clip from The Real News also has footage from an interview with Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood, on sustained interference by recent US presidents, Bush and Clinton, and financiers with the ability of the twice reelected Haitian president, President Aristides, to carry out his election program. Bush and Clinton have already become involved in the US Disaster Aid program. This is a real problem for Haiti and for the world.

Former Australian football player Sam Kekovich has been accused by animal rights activists of accepting "blood money" for an ad campaign in which he urges people to eat more lamb.

As a planet, we're not eating enough lamb," Kekovich says.

The campaign is on behalf of Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA).

A patriotic meal to celebrate Australia Day should be one that does not cause the environmental damage that livestock do, and one that recognises that our ecosystem is already stressed.  Animals suffer confinement, mutilations, extremes of weather, having their young stolen from them and long journeys to abattoirs before their final slaughter.  As human numbers increase, animals lose more and more rights to normal lives.

A new report by the Worldwatch Institute has remade some calculations about just how much greenhouse gases are produced by livestock, previously thought to be about 12 per cent. The report, called Livestock and Climate Change, concludes that livestock’s contribution to greenhouse emissions actually accounts for 51 per cent of the total world's green house gas emissions. That’s nearly three times the previously estimated figure.

Meat production has increased by 500 percent since 1950.

According to the World Health Organisation, 90% of cancers are avoidable.  Many are due to over consumption of fats, livestock products and the toxins we eat and are surrounded by. Paying the "real" price for meat would limit consumption, and thus reduce our public health bill, protect our environment from the massive environmental impacts of deforestation for grazing, limit air and water pollution and the cost to wildlife habitat.   The evil and cruelty of factory farming is a blight on our supposedly civilised society!

Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes, about one child every five seconds, while the wealthy consume meat from grain-fed livestock! Overproducing and over consuming meat, milk and eggs have become a health hazard in the North, while the South suffers from chronic malnutrition — in part due to underproduction and under consumption of these foods.

Comparing livestock products to other food sources shows that producing livestock products requires significantly more water, fossil fuels and land, leading to a greater environmental impact. Simply by altering our food choices., we can make a significant contribution to reducing our ecological footprint.

Last week saw a relatively weak pastiche featuring “Simon Kennovich” in an effort to promote vegetarianism.
LAMB ON AUSTRALIA DAY? Sam Kekovich's rival says, thats un-Australian

The livestock industry is a major contributor to this loss of species, with the World Wide Fund for Nature reporting that 37% of terrestrial ecoregions identify livestock as one of their current threats.

(Steinfeld H, Gerber P, Wassenaar T, Castel V, Rosales M, de Haan C.
Livestock's long shadow : environmental issues and options. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations; 2006)

Prof Ian Lowe , ACF President, wondered how anyone could call themselves an environmentalist and still eat meat. He told us that we could help the planet more by reducing, or better still giving up eating animal products than just about anything else we could do as individuals.

According to the CSIRO , over 90 per cent of land degradation is caused by animal industries.

Over farming and over grazing will inevitably result in erosion and loss of habitat, and nearly half of our continent is used for grazing. As a result, our forests are cleared and topsoil is lost.

For a real patriotic feast on Australia Day, go Veg!

Haiti: There's no such thing as a curse
by

First published, in French at Mondialisation.ca, 15 January 2010
Translated by Sheila Newman

How often do we hear the expression "cursed" in conjunction with Haiti's situation? As if, rather than consider the real political causes, we would rather trust in God. It's easier. Less dangerous.

God doesn't send accounts, after all. God cannot be reelected or not reelected after 4 years. The recent history of Haiti is largely that of a dispossessed country, broken, a country that liberal economics has demolished.

US abolished law stopping foreign-ownership

It wasn't God that landed on the island in 1915 and occupied it for 20 years; it was American marines that allowed Washington to abolish the clause in the Constitution that prevented foreigners from owning businesses in the country. Thousands of inhabitants were dispossessed. Giant plantations were created. Because of an army that was busier fighting its own people than anything else, it was permitted for 1% of the population to own 50% of the resources of the country.

It wasn't God either that supported Duvalier's terrible dictatorship for decades, Duvalier who was more interested in enriching himself than in building a country worthy of the name. It was France and the United States.

Political and Economic interference disastrous

And it wasn't God who overthrew Aristide, in 2004, after he had again abolished the army (as he had done in the 1990s, but was then overthrown by a coup d'Etat) and after he tried to oppose the privatisations and the external control of the country, but clearly and simply the United States, Canada and France, who replaced Aristide with the neo-liberal economist, Gérard Latortue.

It wasn't God who destroyed this country; it was Men of flesh and blood, Men who preferred to fill their pockets rather than to fight against poverty, to support a central government capable of applying stricter standards of housing or of fighting the deforestation that makes cyclones so much more dangerous.

Many other countries are hit by natural disasters. How many times has Cuba been touched by cyclones as strong as those that have hit Haiti? How many times has Japan been the victim of earthquakes just as violent as those which hit Haiti yesterday? It wasn't God that destroyed Haiti; it was Men. It wasn't God that protected the other countries; it was Men who decided it should be that way.

Sending a few dollars to Haiti is good, but that won't change the system. No-one is against charity, but you don't build a society on charity.

We could bury Haiti under thousands of millions of million billion dollars and the problem wouldn't be fixed. Haiti is the failure of a country without a strong central state, corrupted to the marrow, dispossessed of itself by ideological choices made by foreign countries.

Haiti is the result of a catastrophic history to which have been added the catastrophe of economic reforms that have diluted the power of the State, whilst creating a de facto libertarian paradise built on luck and make-do, where the lack of any social cohesion gives rise to the worst aberrations.

The best way to help the Haitians isn't to send them money. It is by demanding that each of our governments but out so that, finally, once and for all, the Haitians can be responsible for their bad luck and their good luck.

So that, finally, we stop blaming God and instead we look at what we Men can do for this destroyed land.

And perhaps, also, remembering that our governments have Haitian blood on their hands and that they are directly responsible for that unspeakable catastrope because of their persistent interference to stop Haiti developing.

We can add these tens of thousands of deaths to the tragic total of savage capitalism; they are less visible than the victims of 'communism', but just as dead!

Maybe that's another advantage of having God at your sides ...

Source: Louis Préfontaine's blog.

http://louisprefontaine.com/

Articles de Louis Préfontaine publiés par Mondialisation.ca

A blogsite called "Catholic Dialogue" sounds so extreme in its condemnation of feminism, contraception and women's choice that you wonder if it's actually a joke. The blogsite warns people not to donate to Caritas Haiti because they support condoms, the celebration of Women's International Day and present a 'negative image of the Catholic Church'!

Please DO therefore consider donating to Caritas Haiti. Their site is here. And thanks, Catholic Dialogue, for telling us about them. They have survived the earthquake, I just learned, although their bank did not. They expect to post details of where to send help tomorrow.

The unnamed author of Catholic Dialogue links us to another blog called "SOCON or Bust because Liberalism is killing us" where someone called Pachecho has written:

"The principal organization which Development & Peace has named to assist in the country, Caritas Haiti, is likely an abortion-supporting organization too. They have a “strategy” plan that says women are discriminated against in the Church and that women do not control their “reproduction”. In addition, Population Services International– which specializes in, among other things “reproductive health” is a donor to Caritas Haiti and describes them as one of their “partners”."

So, please, DO therefore consider donating to Caritas Haiti. Their site is here.

Here Caritas Haiti describes the objectives of a plan called "Strategic operational plan 2006 – 2011; Development program; Strategic sub-program: Promotion of Women's rights.

"Analysis of the Problematic situation

Problems

Feminisation of poverty;
Low participation of women in political activity in the country;
More women are illiterate;
Very few women own businesses;
Lack of services adapted or to specific training for their reproductive health;
Women don't know about their rights or the written law;
Increased violence against women;
Increase in the level of girls who leave school early;
Women suffer discrimination through laws which give men priority;
Low support for women who are victims of violence;
Men fail to assume their family responsibilities, which then increases the weight of responsibility on the women;
Discrimination against women inside the Church, in the family, and in society;
The majority of women live in de facto relationships without legal recourse in case of conflict with their partner;
Women do not control their reproductive capacity
Women do not have access to information.
Women's work is not valued.
The majority of women do not have an occupation or profession.
Women are not emancipated and refuse to enter activities which are considered masculin
They don't know their rights and are not able to properly fulfil their role in communities and exercise their political rights;
The health of women deteriorates and becomes fragile because of their difficult living condition;

Causes

Women have little access to education and training;
Women's organisations are poorly structured;
Poor standard of means and tools to permit women to look after their issues;
Poor level of salaries for women compared to men's in the same or comparable work;
Poor access to resources;
Poor access to professional training by young girls in the country;
Sexual discrimination;
Women have no economic power;
Women are not sufficiently trained;
Women lack good knowledge of their basic rights;
Negligence and absence of parents;
Women are not sufficiently professionally specialised;
Customs, traditions and stereotypes are unfavourable to women;
Women are systematically excluded;
Social and familial discrimination;
Lack of health infrastructure (hospitals, pharmacies, health centers)
Women lack leadership;
Poor access to health services in remote areas;
Low consideration for gender equity in families;
Socio-economic degradation;
High rate of unemployment (55.4% of unemployed people are women)
Paternal irresponsibility.

Consequences:

Women's dependent situation prevents them from negotiating their sexuality and the power of birth control;
They are not able to manage to meet their needs and take control and they fall into poverty;
Women are afraid to admit to being ill (breast cancer, uterine cancer, sexually transmitted illnesses etc)
Out of proportion population growth;
Street children are increasing with mothers unable to cope;
Increasing numbers of girls in the streets and in domestic service;
Separation and division - (single parent households);
Lack of confidence and self-esteem in women;
Violence and abuse of women;
Decision-making roles are entirely occupied by men;
Gender equity is not adequately taken into account in development projects;
Increase migration of women;
Women are marginalised;
Increased women's death rate
Increasing rates of AIDS in women;
Women are excluded and exploited."

Ugly competition for funding or pure religious fundamentalism?

Canada's Development and Peace Catholic organisation of "channelling Haiti emergency funding through dubious 'partner'"! And readers are crudely urged not to make their contribution through them.

And Catholic Dialogue goes on in an obscene focus on dogma minutiae while people are buried alive:

"Even though they don't use the word "contraception", the wording used here is eerily similar to the typical euphemisms used by the pro-choice crowd. The wording used above is not necessarily in contradiction with Church teaching. Indeed, the decision to have children or even to engage in sex should be a joint decision between husband and wife. That's why the Church teaches that even married couples must sometimes practice chastity. So if Haitian men are forcing themselves on their wives without their approval, that's akin to rape. But if that were the true intention of Caritas Haiti's education programs, they should have been more prudent with their wording. The way it's currently written sounds too much like feminist drivel about a woman's "right to control her body". We all know what that really means.

I contacted Caritas Haiti to obtain clarification of these statements on their website, but I still haven't heard back from them. They must be swamped due to the earthquake. May God help them."

Gee, I wonder what's stopping Caritas Haiti from answering these urgent questions.

But, wait, there's more. Apparently the US government has partners in AID who are, gasp, shock, horror...

"Distributing condoms on behalf of the U.S. government?

"On the website of the United States President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, you can find a list of the "partners" that work with the U.S. government to prevent the spread of AIDS. Among the list I found this:

"Is Caritas Haiti only involved in the "Abstinence/Be Faithful" programs, or are they also pushing condoms? I really hope it's the former. The same website contains a document that lists Caritas Haiti among the groups promoting "Abstinence/Be Faithful" programs. I hope that's the extent of their work on this project.

"On another site, I found a detailed curriculum for Catholic high schools in Haiti entitled Instruction curriculum for education on life, family, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS for Catholic secondary schools in Haiti. Caritas Haiti helped write this curriculum with other organizations. As far as I can tell, the curriculum teaches students to practice abstinence until marriage, which is very good. There is no mention of contraception. So we don't know for sure whether Caritas Haiti is involved in distributing contraceptives under the US government program, but the statements from their own website suggest that they are probably doing so in another context."

And, finally - at least that's all I'm going to quote -

"They helped organize the 2008 International Women's Day in Haiti

"If you visit the website of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) you'll discover that Caritas Haiti received a grant of more than $30,000 in 2008 for "Support for a Binational March to Celebrate International Women's Day - March 8, 2008". While I don't know for sure, I imagine that "Binational" refers to the two countries that share the island: Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

"In case you didn't know, International Women's Day has become an annual manifestation for radical feminists around the world to promote abortion rights and contraception. What the heck is Caritas Haiti doing supporting this event?"

Notice for International Women's Day in Rye, Victoria Australia.

And by the way folks, while we are on the subject, International Women's Day in Victoria, Australia is on the 8th of March, at 3 Lyon's Street Rye at the Women's house - that 'Purple Place'. (03) 59855955 [email protected]
Women will have the microphone all day and there will be lots to eat and lots of speakers. There will be the usual ceremony at the end of the Rye pier with a period of silence and respect for women who have died in war and through other crimes of violence against women. I think that after I send them this article, they will be talking a lot about the poor women of Haiti, who, in addition to sharing the horrors of an earthquake, must bear the injuries and indignities of Catholic Church anti-women ideology.

Climate Action Centre Briefing Note, 20 January 2010

Recently, the Murdoch press have continued their campaign of climate denial and delay by giving front-page prominence to a five-day-old story attacking the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions of glacial melt in the Himalayan-Tibetan ranges by 2035.

Drawing on a 13 January New Scientist story by Fred Pearce reporting on a debate amongst glaciologists about the IPCC's claim, "The Times" (UK) and subsequently "The Australian" and other Murdoch papers have tried to shift from a debate about TIMING to a questioning of global warming.

Opposition leader Tony Abbot has now used the reporting to attack Labor's climate policies and again questioned the need for climate action.

While there is unequivocal peer-reviewed science on global warming and its impact on the glacial melt in the Himalayan region, the IPCC left itself open to attack by basing its time frame for a major loss of the glacial ice sheets on a previous "New Scientist" reporting of "speculative" statements by an Indian scientist.

There is much to criticise in the IPCC's 2007 report, in particular their low predictions of sea level rise this century for example, for the report is based on old science (pre-2005) and is too conservative in its predictions of the timing and extent of many climate impacts. Hence the deep for updates such as the Copenhagen climate science congress in March 2009.

But instead of examining these problems, "The Australian" and "The Times" have chosen to focus on one unsubstantiated prediction contained in the report to throw into question concerns about the Himalayan big melt and climate change more generally. This is despite the unequivocal evidence of substantial glacial loss and warming in the Himalayan-Tibetan region.

Glacial retreat on the Himalayas/Tibetan Plateau is well documented from satellite observations and aerial photography. Glaciers around the world are melting and thinning at an increasing rate, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service. Himalayan glaciers have been retreating more rapidly than glaciers elsewhere and has intensified in the last 10 years. For example, the Imja glacier retreated at an average rate of 42 metres per year from 1962–2000, but 74 metres per year 2001–2006. A study of 612 glaciers in China between 1950 and 1970 found that 53 per cent were retreating. After 1990, 95 per cent of these glaciers were measured to be retreating.

Last year, we compiled a report for Friends of the Earth Australia that reviewed the climate impacts in Australia. While it included a reference to the IPCC claim, it also outlined a substantial body of evidence on warming and glacial melt that is still valid. It also examined the catastrophic impact on the Asian region of substantial glacial melt, in particular the threat to the water security of over a billion people. You can download the report: HIghstakes: climate change, the Himalayas, Asia and Australia.

As climate policy analyst Joseph Romm said this week "Good news: The Himalayan glaciers will probably endure past 2035. Bad news: If we don't reverse our emissions trend soon, their disappearance is likely to become irreversible before then." His blog entry is worth reading in full.

Predictions about the timing of climate change impacts are the most imprecise of the many aspects of climate science. Ice sheet dynamics are particularly difficult. The loss of the Arctic sea ice, for example, is occurring seventy years earlier than IPCC predictions.

So while there is no doubt the IPCC got it wrong when it gave so much weight to this reference, we should not let a debate about timing undermine our acceptance of the fundamental threat of the loss of the Asian glaciers.

Damien Lawson and David Spratt

www.climateactioncentre.org
www.twitter.com/climatecentre
carbonequity.info
climatecodered.blogspot.com

Resources

Write letters to The Australian: letters [ AT ] theaustralian.com.au

Here is a response we got published today on The Australia's letters page.

Some recent media reports on climate change and the Himalayas

Signs of change in the Himalayas as Copenhagen summit begin
John Vidal, Guardian, 6 December 2009

The Tragedy of the Himalayas
Bryan Walsh, Time, 7 December 2009

Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China
Michael Sheridan, The Sunday Times, 8 November 2009

Himalayan sherpas bugged by the sight of house flies at 5,000m
John Vidal, Guardian, 12 October 2009

Tibet most harmed by global warming
Wang Huazhong, China Daily, 7 May 2009

Black soot and the survival of Tibetan glaciers
James Hansen, GISS brief, December 2009