From The Hip
With Sunday being the NSW Premier Maurice Iemma recite his spin doctors bullshit to the Sheeple, and those who actually can see past the stockyards of the party faithful.
With the internet no hosting many SOS-NEWS style media resources that do not come under the two party system or the mainstream media who dance to the government tune.
Keeping in mind that elections are harvest time for the media moguls with your tax dollars in the millions squandered on bullshit along with corporate donations playing each way odds looking for favours when the two horse race winner is announced.
We have been looking into the electoral act and what the governments of time have done to remove any threat to their existence from the people wishing to remove the preference voting debacle, the formula of calculation to stifle Independents who challenge the hallowed ground of dictatorship, and have got some interesting material you can read next week.
Despair not as the force we are seeing of independents running in both houses, and the threat of the greens getting another two seats, giving them control in the upper house, along with a nation having enough of bureaucratic rule in this once democracy, will send shivers down the back of those pollies that do not skills to recall when flung out into the street.
Speaking with a RASHIONAL green this week was a breath of fresh air.
An ability to reason, listen and adjust between common sense and what is right for the environment was a shock to my system.
This lady, in her late 60's and well educated, said what we have been saying concerning National Parks are run under MYTH- management, fuel loads in the forest are stupidity, and to quote her - " Environmental legislation obviously drafted by the architects who constructed the Third Reich manual on absolute dominance"
I asked, "who will you would vote for"? She replied, "Adolf Hitler of course .. he's dead but still maintains control" - laughing as she left the meeting we were at.
Mal Davies (Editor)
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QUIET ACHIEVER Wal Whalley AM
Wal Whalley AM, researcher (University new England Armidale NSW) into native grasses and herbs (wildflowers) is a wonderful tribute to a man that has influenced many agricultural scientists and befriended many farmers swimming against the tide in valuing, nurturing and protecting native species in Australia.
Wal has long been a campaigner for managed grazing of native grasslands to retain biodiversity. Plant thrift, soil fertility and nutrient recycling. He has looked at the use of introduced legumes to mix in for good effect, various grazing management regimes, needs and response for fertilizer.
Wal would be horrified about the capture of many once vibrant grasslands and forests deliberately deprived of grazing and or cool fire in the name of national park water catchments with grasses and wildflowers deprived of the essence of what drives their life cycle.
Wal has always been very innovative and futuristic. Prepared to cut his own path. As with any research a saleable product can taint its outcomes, however Wal has swum against tough times in the funding game where importers of exotic plants and crops have been the flavour of the month. Sadly funding bodies and bureaucracies have had the big political stick out on research directions, but blokes like Wal have stuck to their guns. He has touched many of his students, often many bush kids that have grown up trying to rationalize the reality of what they observed of native grasslands, wildlife and grazing livestock living symbiotically (mutually beneficial) with the modern spin on conservation, where farming and forestry apparently has no place.
The gang green has raced in and captured the efforts of astute communities, grabbing their vibrant conservation achievements and making national parks, feeding them to the dogs, letting the aggressive species take over, weeds invade and massive bushfire burn the evidence.
The most advanced ecologists and conservationists in Australia are the farmers, foresters and fishermen, overseeing our most significant native lands, yet have been subjected to a campaign of hate and derision to furnish the needs of generating profit and vocation off farm. Our native lands looked after by the most valuable and committed bushmen are taken, misunderstood and largely destroyed.
As a former student of Wal Whalley I would like to thank Wal as being a very important influence in my perceptions of understanding complex biological systems where we want to retain, progress and be part of natural Australia, protecting it from harsh fire, whilst enhancing water supply and security. Wal has been a rock for many to cling to in looking to demonstrate a better future for our Snowy among other landscapes and how they must be managed
To harvest the grasses, wildflowers and forests, as self-funded conservation, is a win win for every one. This far better than the option for our native lands where water, carbon, bushfire fighting industry, buying misled green votes and yuppy environmental careers are the new commodities not much to do with securing our native lands exploited and neglected by those making a big deal of their environmentalism.
Wal, there a fair few of us out here that you have helped educate and live the reality in the dense fog of political spin. Native forests thrive on being selectively thinned, cool fired and grazed, with native grasses and herbaceous wildflowers also requiring grazing and/or cool fire to flourish year in year out.
Wal we would like to publicly thank you and congratulate you.
Noeline Franklin Bsc
(Former CSIRO Scientist)
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TIMES OF LONDON EXPOSES GREENHOUSE HOAX
From The Sunday Times February 11, 2007
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months' time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains "very likely" as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved
controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heat waves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful
evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
Background
- 'Blame cosmic rays for warming up the planet'
- No excuse for soft climate change laws
- Jeremy Clarkson: Cornered by the green lynch mob
- Related Internet Links
- New Scientist on Climate Change
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you're at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it's confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That leveling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high, but roughly level state of activity.
Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun's brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have
passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark's idea - apart from its being politically incorrect - was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish
National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report;
the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark's initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and
published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it "A new theory of climate change".
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark's scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature's marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
The Chilling Stars is published by Icon. It is available for £9.89 including postage from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
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Letter To The Editor
Dear Editor,
While it can be argued that New South Wales isn't Victoria, when it comes to the management of the public's estate, our environments are similar.
This letter has nothing to do with the Murray Darling debacle, sorry, debate, except that rivers north and west of the Great Dividing Range flow into the Murray and the Murrumbidgee. Perhaps in ten years time that will just be a memory?
New South Wales has gone to extreme lengths to reconfigure public land into National Parks which are then closed for all vehicular traffic and consequently overgrown to the point where they are impassable.
I refer to the ACT Coroner's Report. No fire access tracks equals no access to fire sources, equals no management, equals horrendous fires in summer as massive fuel loads explode into flame and I add, equals a reduction in the water harvest until incinerated water catchments are regrown.
Back in Victoria, Melbourne Water scientific researchers advise that, after a feral fire, and maybe five years of good water flow (although probably carrying ash, eroded soil and maybe Phoschek into our reservoirs, reducing their capacity to hold clean water) the regenerated forest starts consuming the majority of rainfall, depriving rural communities of huge quantities of clean fresh water. There is very little to catch in the catchments!
Please, Google the Forest Fire (Vic) Inc website, then go to "Articles" and look at "The facts behind the Fires". While the whole article is worth reading, at pages 100 to 102 there is a scientific article explaining that, where old growth forests are incinerated, it can take two hundred years for the water flow to return. Where regrowth forest such as 1939 forests are concerned it will still take 65 years for water harvesting to return to its pre fire flows.
In the Preliminary Esplin Report regarding the Victorian 2003 fires, Esplin makes specific mention of the fire management plans of Melbourne Water at Section 5 .5. Well may we wonder at the lengths that Melbourne Water goes to to protect its water. What a shame that rural and regional areas don't have that scale of protection for their water catchments.
Perhaps it is the wish of the NSW community to deprive posterity of their water. Perhaps it is party political politics to ensure that our grandchildren know the meaning of unquenched thirst.
I suspect it is time for some Independents to hold the balance of power in the NSW Legislative Council and force good environmental management upon your Parliament.
Yours faithfully,
John Cribbes
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