The Flag, Dr T and beach cricket

I have been thinking on what it means to be Australian in the last week or so. What with the furore over the Flag and Big Day Out and Australia Day itself there is plenty to chew on. Its funny that a few short years ago the Australian flag was something of a anomaly - it was something that sat atop our flag poles but as a symbol of what Australia wanted to be in its bicentennial or even later in the year 2000 - it did not figure largely. I remember a time when the Boxing Kanagaroo was the flag of choice at cricket games and the Union Jack and the red white and blue colours of our flag were something that many people wanted to change. However, these days everywhere I go it seems that there is a manifestation of the flag there to greet me. Hanging cape like from cricket supporters necks or shaped in T-shirt or boxer short or even bikini form, or even tatooed on some girl's back at the beach. To me it just doesn't seem right, it seems to indicate a more parochial and adimantly patriotic country - not the friendly inclusive country I sometime ago believed Australia was turning into. I guess in the wake of Septemeber 11 and the outbreak of US patriotism that that event created, many Australians feel there society is also "under threat" more than ever before. Sure there was Bali but it is funny that we feel we need to retreat to a very nationalist form of expression to counter this threat. In Australia itself that threat is at worst overstated, at best it doesn't really exist at all. One crazy sheikh does not a Muslem threat make.

When Dr Tim Flannery was made Australian of the year a week or so ago it did restore some of my faith in Australia (even John Howard - the truth be told). His contribution to science in Australia has been remarkable and his unswerving voice for ration sustainable change has really found a willing audience in the last year or so - all around the world. When I first read his Future Eaters it really opened my mind to many of the issues facing Australia - and while I didn't always agree with his conclusions or policy prescriptions he raised important issues in his writing that certainly needed to be raised - also his writing really elucidated these ideas better than any I have read before or since. How many people can the Australian continent sustainable hold. His conclusion was about 8 or 9 million from memory - far short of the current 20m and along way short of the 50m that many demographers predict Australia will hold in 30 or 40 years from now. His more recent and more widely accliamed book The Weather Makers is really a book that could easily companion Al Gore 's An Inconvenient Truth - but with far more research and science and also perhaps a slight touch of Aussie humour which Mr Gore could possibly do with. Though it is probably hard to laugh when you are making so many dour predictions.

The last few days I have been in Sydney - courtesy of XXXX Gold and have been attending the XXXX Gold beach cricket which my girlfriend is helping to look after. Quite fun. Basically it is a bunch of 20 or so ex-cricketers getting together to promote beer by playing beach cricket on 3 beaches around Australia. The final was in Sydney today - which the English actually won. A cruel irony for them and their 2006-2007 cricket season - the only thing that the English could win was beach cricket. One of the funniest things about being here and being part of the whole thing is watching how fame f*cks with people's heads. Most of the ex-cricketers involved have been out of the game for a while - and this competition allows many of them to reacquaint themselves with the semi-famous nature of being a lauded sports person. This means the constant attention of fans for autographs, their minders for photo ops and those involved in the promotion for their attention. Not to mention the fact that twenty something chicks will give them attention again. Some of whom have let that go to their head. I guess it can be a funny little world that is created by fans, old times, XXXX gold angels and a fake one at that. I decided against going to the Bourbon and Beefsteak with all the crew tonight. Perhaps it is because I am not psychophantic enough - or perhaps it is because I had to go to work tomorrow. Or perhaps it is because I can't really judge these guys - as I will never be famous enough to warrant the attention they get - even in their middle age. Who knows. What I do know is that they will have to go back to their wives and lives sooner or later. We all do.

In trouble with the dairy farmers from Shepp....

In yesterday's Age a letter I sent in was published....

Psst, Mr Thwaites: what about milk …

WATER Minister John Thwaites (Opinion, 23/1) takes a very Melbourne-centric view of the current water crisis. Our entire state, not just Melbourne, needs to radically rethink the way it uses water.
Mr Thwaites correctly points out that households must continue to cut their water use inside and out, including letting go of long-held traditions, such as water-thirsty gardens, which are no longer sustainable when our catchments don't receive sufficient inflows. But in the same way, irrigators must also take a hard look at their water use. It may even be time to give up long-held farming practices that are no longer viable.
The minister is right in saying that very little rice and even less cotton is grown in Victoria. But he fails to mention the dairy industry, which accounts for more than 40 per cent of Victoria's water use. And that most dairy product from northern Victoria is exported, taking our precious water with it.
The irrigation industry is far and away Victoria's biggest water user and it will have to make changes and stop draining our rivers dry if it is to have any chance of a sustainable future.

Cormo, Melbourne

Now I have to admit now that I didn't actually write it - I have a friend at Environment Victoria who wrote it and asked me to send it in. (Then the funny heading was added by a pretty humourous subby!) Unfortunately a good friend of mine is married to a girl whose parents run a dairy farm in Shepparton. And when they read my letter they were a little pissed off... Not all that surprising...evidently my name is now mud in the greater Shepparton area...

But what I have to say is that dairy farming is pretty water intensive - in 2004-05
the dairy farming industry used 5% more water than all the households in
Australia put together.

My friend however cam back with:

Yes dairy farming is water intensive but if we don't have milk we don't
have:
1. Kahula and milk
2. C*%k sucking cowboys
3. something to mix with milo
4. caramel milkshakes

And I must admit to being a massive milk fan in my primary and secondary school years.

So I'm torn between healthy rivers and the good people of the dairy industry and all the good things that come from cows - like milk, cheese and (sour) cream.

But the Dairy industry also made $2 billion in exports last year - maybe its time they put some money back into conserving one of our prescious resources in Australia - water.

Crikey comments...

As a bit of background Crikey's Christian Kerr (see article at the bottom of this post) is a serial anti-green antagonist and at best an unhappy climate change accepter. But I think the debate ought to move on....especially from the views of comments from people like Stuart Glazebrook....

Here is what I wrote...

Cormo writes: Mr Glazebrook's comments highlight the polar nature of current debate in Crikey and more widely on human induced climate change. As a fact we know that over the last few years the Earth has been warming (as compared to the last 150 years at least) and we also know that the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane and other so-called greenhouse gases have been increasing in the Earth's atmosphere. We know that many of our activities contribute to this increased gas concentration. While we can't say for sure that our emissions contribute to this warming, on the balance of probability the majority of climate scientists believe that they do. As the only way to find out if the dire environmental consequences predicted by climate modelling are true or not is to keep doing what we are doing and see what happens, it seems prudent to take some action. What we also know is that with incremental change to our lifestyle/energy production/travel methods etc. we can probably seriously reverse this pattern of emissions in 40 to 50 years. Where the debate is in Europe and in many US and Australian boardrooms now is: how can we make the most of this? Where are the opportunities? What is the cheapest source of greenhouse gas abatement? How can reduce our emissions? Sure, it's probably a fad, but capitalism thrives on innovation and the next area of innovation seems to be green - renewable energy, sustainable development, energy efficiency, carbon trading and the financial/trading systems and capital that follows it. A corollary is the improved energy security situation and the development of new industry (perhaps even export !). But it seems to me that it comes down to which dire circumstances you believe - dire climatic outcomes of the IPCC or dire economic outcomes that those who believe a move toward emission reductions will bring. Both are probably overstated, but even a large blip on the economic radar in the 2010's will probably mean very little to us or our kids or grand kids compared to major climatic change in 40 to 50 years' time.

Two others had slightly more evidence based answers...


Mike Martin writes: Stuart Glazebrook (yesterday, comments) appears, in questioning man-made global warming, to be suffering from gross adverbial and adjectival over-sufficiency and a severe shortage of facts. He asks for "one irrefutable, non-emotive, scientifically incontrovertible element of proof that man has contributed" to global warming. Science does not provide irrefutable, incontrovertible proof of any scientific theory. This is why physicists continue to scratch their heads over, for example, Einstein's theory of relativity (which of course contradicted Isaac Newton's theory of gravity). A century after relativity theory was formulated and long after its successful application to the design of nuclear bombs, scientists are still wondering if there is something seriously wrong with it. The consensus view about global warming that Glazebrook disparages is in fact a consensus that, despite all efforts to date by sceptical scientists, nobody has come up with a better explanation for current climate change than that it is due to increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that the increasing concentration is substantially due to human activity. It is unclear whether Glazebrook denies that global climate is changing, or just that the change is substantially a consequence of human activity. If the former, the Bureau of Meteorology has on its website a useful collection http://www.bom.gov.au of trend charts and datasets which he might like to consult.

Mark Byrne writes: Stuart Glazebrook claims that the evidence for man-made global warming is derived from little more than complex computer models. This claim fails to acknowledge the basic physics of heat trapping greenhouse gases. Svante Arrhenius didn't use computers when in 1896 he calculated that doubling atmospheric CO2 would cause a temperature rise of five degrees Celsius. Glazebrook also requests "one irrefutable, non-emotive, scientifically incontrovertible element of proof" that man has contributed to global warming. This is quite a limiting request, simply because any scientific theory, such as the theory of gravity and theory of evolution are explained with a sequence of evidence, rather than a single element of evidence. However, given Glazebrook's lack of acknowledgement of the relationship between CO2 and temperature, I would nominate for him, the robust correlation between CO2 and temperature as demonstrated by the analysis of Antarctic ice cores running from present to 400 thousand years ago (graphic link). At the risk of exceeding Glazebrook's limit, I'd add that current CO2 concentrations now exceed all records for ice core data.


Here is what Stuart had to say earlier....


Stuart Glazebrook writes: Graeme Major (22 January, comments) represents the very worst of the global warming Kool-Aid drinkers in his recent attack on Christian Kerr. Rather than provide counter to his perceived holes in Kerr's arguments, Major instead adopts the time-honoured 'consensus' view in support of his own spurious beliefs, chiding that he could provide Kerr with "all the factual evidence he could possibly want". "Flooding rains, big droughts and mega bushfires" are cited by Major as proof positive of global warming. Nonsense. Extreme weather patterns have been a fact of geological life on Earth well before bipedal hominids first invented the steam engine. Here is a challenge to all the backyard and dining table scientists: please provide just want one irrefutable, non-emotive, scientifically incontrovertible element of proof that man has contributed to what is the "general theory" of global warming. Documented climate change has occurred on this planet for 4.3 billion years. Data supporting the belief in man's supposed destructive impact would not even go back 150 years. Disturbingly, this largely chimerical and emotive argument and the ever-increasingly shrill demands of its supporters risks committing countries like Australia and their populace to financial larceny in its pursuit of a solution. The so-called "factual evidence" for man-made global warming is derived from little more than randomly generated data scenarios fed into overly-complex computer models that produce wildly inconsistent and often misleading and inconclusive results. Unfortunately, it seems many in the media and government have also supped at this font and accepted without question the most direst and catastrophic predictions for humankind's future. Major would do well to consider the "statistically huge standard error involved" in such scientific investigation when next offering his layman's views.

In response to.....


Graeme Major writes: Christian Kerr doesn't get it or pretends he doesn't get it. It is about time he understood what is causing global warming - too much carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The concentration of those gases is increasing all the time and contributing to the higher frequency of extreme weather events. At the molecular level carbon dioxide and methane absorb far more heat than the oxygen and nitrogen which make up most of the atmospheric gas mixture. This fact has been a proven fact for decades. If anything, the flooding rains, big droughts and mega bushfires are examples of the effects predicted from global warming, not the converse as he implies. Perhaps Christian could kindly state precisely what more evidence he needs to be convinced global warming is real. Unless he is really dumb, I would be happy to present him with all the factual evidence he could possibly want. The device of choosing one, two or three apparently exceptional examples, ignoring the statistically huge standard error involved, and extrapolating them to debunk a general theory or principle is a standard trick of journalism.


From the original....



Er, yes, the weather's like that in Australia

Christian Kerr writes:



Green fundamentalists haven't just brainwashed the soppy-minded middle classes. Journalists in normally intelligent newspapers seem to have fallen prey to their propaganda, too.
"Central Desert awash in wake of monsoon deluge," Nicholas Rothwell and Andrew McGarry write in http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21082610-2702,00.html The Australian today:
Rain is falling in the Central Desert, its misty veils hanging like nets around the peak-line of the MacDonnell Range at Alice Springs and bringing to life the sandy bed of the town's Todd River...
The rain has also deluged the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, in South Australia's north, which received its biggest rains in five years: 50mm fell in less than 12 hours.
"It's just great - basically the first decent rain we've had in two years," Mayor Steve Baines said...
That's what the weather does in Australia. Our climate runs on boom-bust cycles. Even bushfires play their part. Think of those native species that need fire as part of their lifecycles.
Indeed, if you want a media account that tells it how it is, you can't beat this Quadrant editorial from five years ago http://www.the-rathouse.com/quadedit49.html :
Here we go again. Once again there is grandiose talk of "drought proofing" Australian agriculture, of mounting huge projects to take water from one part of the continent to another, of turning back rivers and making them flow inland, of pumping sewage from the cities to the country, and of more and better irrigation. Not to mention vast amounts of relief to farmers who have been and will, most of them, be in the future better off than the recipients of welfare in the cities.
It is bizarre that while every galah in the pet shop has signed on to slogans about global warming and other simplistic environmental scares, it is possible for such nonsense to be talked at a time when large parts of Australia is in the grip of a drought which, while severe, is not exactly unusual or unprecedented. Even if it proves to be the worst for a century. Surely we have learned by now that the pattern of rainfall in our country is cyclical, affected by factors like the El Nino phenomenon, and drought is as much a fact of life every few years as flood and bushfires. That is what our native flora and fauna have evolved to deal with, as every explosion of life when eventually the rains come shows...
That's what the weather's like in Australia.

It has been a while...........blackout aftermarth

So I haven't been writing much on the blog. I guess living life in the summertime gives one less chance for reflection. Which is not always such a bad thing.

So '07 has started fairly interestingly - both professionally and personally.

I have met some more interesting people in my line of work - one of note is Dr Alan Pears. He is a Professor at RMIT and also the original designer of the Energy Efficient stars on electrical equipment sold in Australia. Currently we use a rating system designed in 1996 (updated in 2000) which uses a 6 star system (although it is really only a 5 star system as every appliance that is sold gets one star as long as it passes basic safety standards ie doesn't blow up). However, the energy efficiency measures put into practice by developers of appliances now mean that many appliances already receive the 6 out of 6 possible stars - and given the way it is calculated some appliances could reach up to 10 stars. Some appliances such as airconditioners and heaters can use a heap of power - especially older models. So if your in the market for an airconditioner - look beyond the stars and check the SRI (Star Ratings Index) - a score of 4 or 4.3 equates to a 4 star rating. But for example a Daikin FTK25SE Split system has a score of 8.07. If you purchased this one and double that up with some extra thick insulation and proper window cover (ie curtains) you could easily drop your energy use and greenhouse emissions by 50% to just installing any old air-con system.

In Melbourne on Tuesday we had our highest ever energy usage day - air-conditioners around the city were really running flat out - and at 40C who could really blame people? However, a bushfire (now burning in Victoria for 3 months) tripped the main interconnector between NSW, the Snowy Hydro scheme and Melbourne - which nearly took down the entire system. I was without power briefly but many people in suburbs around Melbourne were without power for large parts of the night. It really goes to show how vulnerable we all still are to so called "acts of god". The Australian blames the Victorian state government and Alan Moran in the Age blamed the governments pandering to green groups - though his ridiculous statement that a new interconnector could not be built because of environmental fervour. He should now that a new interconnector will not be built because it will cost too much money - I mean who would argue that $2 billion for a 1 in 10 year event so a few shops aren't blacked out is a good investment. With the entire cost of the Victorian Renewable Energy Target Scheme coming in at $250 million over 20 years - that doesn't seem like a bad investment to make 15% of our generators Renewable Energy generators (and in the process build about 5 new windfarms, 1 reflective solar plant and countless smaller renewable generation plants).

I guess we have to accept a small chance that we may not have power for an hour or two when extreme events occur, it will cost far too much to take that away - and I think the priorities of people now is to make sure we are spending our money on outcomes that are sustainable and have a long term focus - such as dealing with the possibility that our actions may have had some effect on the reasons behind this years tinder dry conditions in Victoria this year. But I could be wrong, perhaps people will get more angry about not having airconditioning for one hot evening in January rather than the long term effects people might be having on the planet. I guess one might even call that human nature (whatever that means - outside of a Motown singing Australian boy band that received there first ARIA in 06 after a decade of being overlooked by judges - for highest selling album - as they sing ...there aint no mountain high enough....).