Water is essential for all life, and happily it is abundant on our blue watery planet.
However, salty oceans cover 70% of Earth’s surface and contain 97% of Earth’s water. Salt water is great for ocean dwellers but not directly useful for most life on land. Another 2% of Earth’s water is tied up in ice caps, glaciers and permanent snow, leaving just 1% as land-based fresh water.
To sustain life on land, we need to conserve and make good use of this rare and elusive resource.
Luckily, our sun is a powerful nuclear-powered desalinisation plant. Every day, solar energy evaporates huge quantities of fresh water from the oceans. After a stop-off in the atmosphere, most of this water vapour is soon returned to earth as dew, rain, hail and snow – this is the great water cycle. Unfortunately about 70% of this precipitation falls directly back into the oceans and some is captured in frozen wastelands.
Much of the water that falls on land is collected in gullies, creeks and rivers and driven relentlessly by gravity back to the sea by the shortest possible route. Allowing this loss to happen is poor water management. The oceans are not short of water.
Some animals and plants have evolved techniques to maximise conservation of precious fresh water.
Some Australian frogs, on finding their water holes evaporating, will inflate their stomachs with water then bury themselves in a moist mud-walled cocoon to wait for the drought to break. Water buffalo and wild pigs make mud wallows to retain water in their private mud-baths, camels carry their own water supply and beavers build lots of dams.
Some plants have also evolved water saving techniques – bottle trees and desert cacti are filled with water, thirsty humans can even get a drink from the roots and trunks of some eucalypts and many plants produce drought/fire resistant seeds.
Every such natural water conservation or drought-proofing behaviour brings benefits for all surrounding plants and animals.
People have long recognised the importance of conserving fresh water – early settlers built their homes near the best waterholes on the creek and every homestead and shed had its corrugated iron tanks. Graziers built dams and weirs to retain surface water for stock (and fence-crashing wildlife), used contour ripping and good pasture management to retain moisture in soils, and drilled bores to get underground water. And sensible rules have evolved to protect the water rights of down-stream residents.
In some snow-fed rivers like the Nile, floods are generally a reliable and predictable annual event. For millennia the Nile delivered water and silt fertiliser to the farmers on the flood plains in Lower Egypt. The massive High Aswan Dam may have done more harm than good – it certainly did great harm to the farmers and land down-stream by stealing the silt and the water that supported the productivity of farms that have fed millions since Roman times. The value of the electricity generated by the dam probably does not compensate for these losses.
But in Australia, rainfall is usually a boom and bust affair. Much fresh water is delivered to the land surface suddenly in cyclones, storms and rain depressions. But “The Wet” is always followed by “The Dry”, and droughts and floods are normal climatic events. People who fail to store some of the flood must put up with the drought.
Our Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull lives on the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, and is in a favoured position to observe the climate moods and weather of the Sydney area in the 21st Century.
However, he should be aware that a considerable database exists that scientifically documents the climate history of Sydney Harbour and adjacent beaches, mainly temperature and sea levels, at least from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. When Captain Philip arrived in 1788 and landed at Sydney Cove, he quickly established a weather recording framework to help him better understand what the climate trends might be in this new colony.
Over a three year period from 1788 to 1791, two officers Bradley and Dawes recorded temperatures in the fledgling colony 6 times a day. A log of this data was found in 1977 in a remote corner of the Library of the Royal Society of London, and the data were analysed and plotted by Gergis, Karoly and Allan in 2009. They compared the First Fleet data with BOM data from the Sydney Observatory for the period 1859 to 2014, using monthly averages for Tmaximum and Tminimum. A graph comparing the First Fleet data set 1788-1791 with the BOM data set 1859 to 2014 is shown below, for Tmax.
Remarkably, the First Fleet data (red circles), are almost totally coincident with the later BOM record 1859 to 2014 (green dots); the same result is seen also for average minimum temperatures, and so Malcolm could justifiably claim that in the Sydney area there has been no change in trend of maximum and minimum temperatures over 256 years.
Data from the Fort Denison tide gauge in the harbour also shows an almost stable sea level trend for 129 years from 1886 to present day. In addition, a fisherman’s hut built in 1875 along the high water mark at Long Reef, Collaroy has been photographed in 1907, 1936, 1950 and 2014; remarkably, it exists in precisely the same position now as in 1875, and Malcolm could also justifiably claim that in the Sydney northern beaches there has been no documented sea level rise for about 140 years.
Geoff Derrick is a consultant geologist who believes in the integrity of scientific observation, rather than flawed outputs from computer models. Prepared 29 Nov 2015
Here is a list of key organisations actively promoting the war against civilisation. These are the internationalist thugs who want the poor to stay impoverished and the hungry to remain starving. These are the people who fraudulently claim tax deductibility for their actions in attacking every kind of genuine human progress. These are the dangerous elements who campaign to divert gigantic sums of public money into subsidising sources of energy which cannot function competitively without the assistance of stolen money.
Here is the list: Number one is GetUp!, leading the racist campaign against the Adani company, pushing the line that the poor of India have no right to the inexpensive energy which they crave because they are only Indians.
Number two is Greenpeace, infamous for many reasons including its campaign against DDT, which according to Robert Gwadz of the US National Institutes of Health “may have killed 20 million children” who died unnecessarily from malaria.
Number three is the Australian Conservation Foundation, which confers demigod status on the totally discredited fraudster Al Gore, and persists in its wholly false claim that governments give massive subsidies to the coal industry.
Number four is Seed, a relatively new arrival on the anti-civilisation block. Seed asserts on its Website: Climate Change is the biggest threat to Black Australia, which is a big call. Seed also proclaims: “Opening up our lands to mining is not a solution to black poverty.” Wise Australians such as Warren Mundine keep repeating that the solutions include jobs and training. Seed seems to be on the wrong team.
Number five is the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which specialises in recycling. That is recycling propaganda from all the other anti-civilisation groups without contributing anything original or imaginative. And of course the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, like its allies, has an expert fundraising pitch to part the unwary from their dollars.
After 23 years of implementing AG21 with no democratic mandate, the UN, with the help of our politicians, is now moving to the next stage, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). UN estimates an annual cost of $2-3 trillion indefinitely.
Politicians are continually increasing the risks of electricity blackouts with their dangerous climate policies. It is foolish in the extreme to believe that humans can change the future climate by collecting carbon taxes and covering the hills with wind turbines.
We should ask them: which is worse – gradual man-made global warming or sudden electricity blackout?
Alarmists try to scare us by claiming that man’s activities are causing global warming. Whether and when we may see new man-made warming is disputed and uncertain. If it does appear, the world will be slightly warmer, with more evaporation and rainfall; plants will grow better and colonise some areas currently too cold or too dry; fewer old people will die in winter and sea levels may continue the gradual rise we have seen since the end of the last ice age. There may even be a bit more “green” in Greenland. There is no evidence that man’s production of carbon dioxide is causing more extreme weather events. Any change caused by man will be gradual and there will be plenty of time to adapt, as humans have always done. Most people will hardly notice it.
What is certain, however, is that global warming policies are greatly increasing the chances of electricity blackouts, and here the effects can be predicted confidently – they will be sudden and severe.
Those pushing Agenda 21 deliberately seek to trash traditional Australian values, remove private property rights, destroy Australian sovereignty, independence and prosperity, while at the same time deliberately preventing Australians from making an informed democratic choice. The carbon tax, “sustainability”, smart growth, regional planning etc are all part of this UN sponsored destruction of individual human rights.
This paper presents a simple analysis to estimate the amount of CO2 emissions avoided by wind generation and the cost per tonne avoided as wind penetration increases from 0% to 20%. The carbon price implications are discussed.
For wind power to be viable in Australia the price for electricity would need to be about $120/MWh. The current average wholesale price of electricity is about $30/MWhi. So wind energy must be subsidised by about $90/MWh. If we have a carbon price of $25/MWh then the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) need to reach $65/MWh to make wind viable. (That means the consumer must subsidise wind by $90/MWh, or three times the current wholesale price of electricity.)
The paper concludes that as wind energy penetration increases from 1% to 20% the CO2 avoidance cost increases from $100 to $2,500 per tonne of CO2 production avoided.
Wind energy is a high cost way to avoid CO2 emissions.
The truth about greenhouse gases and the dubious science of the climate crusaders.
By William Happer
Will Happer is a physicist at Princeton University. This article appeared in the internet magazine First Things under the title The Truth About Greenhouse Gases.
“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.
I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.
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