Scientists sign open letter to Australian Government urging action on climate change

We learnt from the replication crisis that up to 60% of scientists are crooked so this tells us nothing.  If they had told us just one of the facts that the government is ignoring that might have been interesting. But they mention no climate facts at all -- just unverifiable speculation about recent weather events

And 270 scientists is insignificant. It is not even the full staff of one of Australia's many universities.  Most academics are Leftists so they could have done a lot better if their letter was seen as important by all its potential signatories


More than 270 scientists have signed an open letter to Australia's leaders calling on them to abandon partisan politics and take action on climate change.

The scientists, who have expertise in climate, fire and meteorology, are calling for urgent action to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and for Canberra to engage constructively in international agreements.

"The thick, choking smoke haze of this summer is nothing compared to the policy smokescreen that continues in Australia," University of NSW climate scientist Katrin Meissner said in a statement on Monday.

"We need a clear, non-partisan path to reduce Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions in line with what the scientific evidence demands, and the commitment from our leaders to push for meaningful global action to combat climate change."

The scientists warned an increase in bushfires was just one part of a deadly equation that suggested the impacts of climate change were coming faster, stronger and more regularly.

Heatwaves on land and in the oceans were longer, hotter and more frequent, they said.

Australian National University climate scientist Nerilie Abram said the letter was the product of scientists' despair as they witnessed the deadly fire season unfold.

"Scientists have been warning policymakers for decades that climate change would worsen Australia's fire risk and yet these warnings have been ignored," Professor Abram said.

Separately, Oxfam said the Government must demonstrate it had fully grasped the lessons of this "horrific" bushfire season.

"In spite of the scientific evidence and the extreme weather we're living through — bushfires, hailstorms and drought — the Government still hasn't joined the dots and taken action to tackle the root causes of the crisis," Oxfam chief executive Lyn Morgain said in a statement.

She said Australia must dramatically strengthen emissions reduction targets and move beyond fossil fuels.

"The Government's narrow-minded focus on adaptation and resilience simply does not go far enough," she said.

She said Australia could wield great authority and leverage globally if it changed its policies.

"If we led by example and immediately strengthened our own emissions reduction commitments, and if we linked our own crisis with those escalating around the world, we could be a great catalyst for stronger international action," she said.

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We don’t have money to burn on green mania

Bjorn Lomborg

Scenes of devastation from Australia’s fires have been heartbreaking. How do we stop this suffering? For many campaigners and politicians, the answer is clear-cut: drastic climate policies. When we examine the evidence, this simple answer falls short.

Australia is the world’s most fire-prone continent. In 1900, 11 per cent of its surface burned annually. These days, 5 per cent of the country burns every year. By the end of the century, if we do not stop climate change, higher temperatures and an increase in aridity will likely mean a 0.7 percentage point increase in burnt area, an increase from 5.3 per cent of Australia to 6 per cent.

This increase is not trivial and it is an argument for effective climate change action. By far the most practical policy, with the most impact, is a dramatic increase in investment in low and zero-carbon energy innovation.

That’s because, for decades to come, solar and wind energy will be neither cheap enough nor effective enough to replace fossil fuels. Today, they make up only 1.1 per cent of global energy use and the International Energy Agency estimates that even after we spend $US3 trillion ($4.47 trillion) more on subsidies, they will not even reach 5 per cent by 2040. Innovation is needed to bring down the price of green energy. We need to find breakthroughs for batteries, nuclear, carbon capture and a plethora of other promising technologies. Innovation can solve our climate challenge.

Unfortunately, many reports on Australia’s fires have exploited the carnage to push a specific agenda, resting on three ideas: that bushfires are worse than ever, that this is caused by global warming, and that the only solution is for political leaders to make even bigger carbon-cut promises.

Globally, bushfires burn less land than it used to. Since 1900, global burnt area has reduced by more than one-third because of agriculture, fire suppression and forest management. In the satellite era, NASA and other groups document significant decreases.

Surprisingly, this decrease is even true for Australia. Satellites show that from 1997 to 2018 the burnt area declined by one-third. Australia’s current fire season has seen less area burned than in previous years. Up to January 26, bushfires burned 19.4 million hectares in Australia — about half the average burn over the similar timeframe of 37 million hectares in the satellite record. (Actually the satellites show 46 million hectares burnt, but 9 million hectares are likely from prescribed burns.)

When the media suggests Australia’s fires are “unprecedented in scale”, it is wrong. Australia’s burnt area declined by more than a third from 1900 to 2000, and has declined across the satellite period. This fire season, at the time of writing, 2.5 per cent of Australia’s area has burned compared with the past 10 years’ 4.8 per cent average by this point.

What is different this year is that fires have been mostly in NSW and Victoria. These are important states with a little more than half the country’s population — and many of its media outlets.

But suggesting fires are caused by global warming rests on cherrypicking these two regions with more fire and ignoring the remaining 87 per cent of Australia’s landmass, where burned area has declined.

Peer-reviewed estimates of the future of Australia’s fire threat see a long-term increase in burnt area because of global warming. But these estimates show the effect of climate change does not increase Australia’s burnt area until the 2030s or 2040s.

A new review of available data suggests it’s not actually possible to detect a link between global warming and fire for Australia today. An increase will become detectable only in the 2040s. The images coming from Australia are shocking, but images should not trump science. Along with many other campaigners, the Australian Greens argue that preventing fires is about “rapidly transitioning to a renewable energy economy”. Carbon-cutting promises from politicians are not going to do a thing.

Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand is aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The government’s own commissioned report shows this will cost 16 per cent of the nation’s annual economy, or $US5 trillion across the century. It will reduce temperatures by only four-thousandths of a degree by 2100.

Replicate those costs across Australian states and around the world; taxpayers are just not going to withstand that kind of pain, regardless of the intention.

The world’s poor countries are never going to be able to afford to follow through. The costs alone make this “solution” to climate change wishful thinking.

Moreover, even if Australia were dramatically to change its climate policy overnight, the impact on fires would be effectively zero. If Australia had completely ended its fossil fuel use way back in 2012, the UN standard climate model shows the impact on fires this year would be literally immeasurable.

Even if Australia could somehow be entirely fossil fuel-free for the entire century, burnt area in 2100 would be 5.997 per cent instead of 6 per cent.

This feeble, flawed response is pathetic. We need to spend far more resources on green energy research and development to develop medium-term solutions to climate change. And we also should focus on the many straightforward measures that would help now.

Bushfire scientists have consistently told us forest fuel levels keep increasing, making extreme bushfires much more likely. Controlled burns cheaply and effectively reduce high-intensity wildfires. Other sensible policies include better building codes, mechanical thinning, safer powerlines, reducing the potential for spread of lightning-caused bushfires, campaigns to reduce deliberate ignitions, and fuel reduction around the perimeter of human settlements.

The compassionate, effective response to Australia’s tragedy is to focus on the policies that could actually help.

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Forget EU: Aussies set to cash in on an Brexit bonanza as Scott Morrison moves to finalise a trade deal with Boris Johnson by the end of the year

Australians are set to cash in on a post-Brexit deal as Scott Morrison moves to finalise a promising agreement with Boris Johnson by the end of the year.

With the UK agreement to finally leave the European Union is passed by its parliament on Friday, Australia looks set to secure a free trade deal by December.

And Australia's wine industry looks likely be the biggest winner once the deal is signed, along with other exporters, as the government is hoping to finalise a deal with low or no tariffs and no quotas.

Australia was a casualty of the UK's entry into the European Economic Community, with beef and sheep exports dropping significantly.

Despite it being unlikely for any new deals to result in Australia returning to one of Britain's top suppliers, it would result in better numbers for primary producers, former trade minister Andrew Robb told The Australian.

'The UK won't return to being our third-largest trading partner but we should aspire for it to re-enter the top 10,' he said.

By removing tariffs, quotas and non-tariff barriers more options will be created - which can only be a good thing for Australia, Mr Robb said.

Economists are predicting the wine industry to be the biggest winner, with demand already high despite the current traffics in place, which European wines don't have.

'The success of Australian wine sales to the UK, where one in five bottles sold is Australian wine, demonstrates that there remains a hunger in the UK market for safe, high quality Australian produce,' Mr Robb said.

CommSec's Craig James told AAP the end of uncertainty over Brexit would allow business to start spending, investing and hiring again.

There was speculation the deal would give Australians the right to live and work in the UK longer-term without a visa, like they do when travelling to New Zealand, however, Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said that was unlikely.

It is understood there is a chance the Youth Mobility visa may be tweaked to allow people under 30 two stints in the UK, meaning person could live in London in their earlier 20s and work in a pub then go back as a professional later.

However, University of South Australia researcher Professor Jimmy Donaghey said Australia was unlikely to reap big benefits from Brexit.

'The geographic distance between the two countries has always been a restriction on trade, but essentially Australia's biggest export earners, things like coal and iron ore, are not in demand by the UK,' he said.

Trade Minister Simon Birmingham wants the deal concluded this year and believes the UK has a similar aim.

A team of EU officials will meet their Australian counterparts in Canberra from February 10 to 14 for the sixth round of negotiations towards the EU-Australia free trade agreement.  

Australia is party to 11 free trade deals that eliminate import tariffs between trading partners.

Bilateral arrangements have been signed with New Zealand (1983), Singapore (2003), the US (2005), Thailand (2005), Chile (2009), Malaysia (2013), South Korea (2014), Japan (2015) and China (2015).

Separate multilateral arrangements were made with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2010 and the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2018.

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It's time to step on the gas'

SHUTTING down Australia's coal mines will not reduce emissions or global demand for the resource, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a speech pitched at regional Australia — and his backbench. He defended his Government's approach to climate change, saying gas reserves would be necessary to any transition to a clean economy, while investing in technology was key to meeting emissions reduction targets.

But Labor took aim at him for failing to take action on "the summer of damage" climate change was causing. Mr Morrison indicated Australia's emissions reductions targets would not be shifting, despite comments earlier this month his Government's climate policies would be evolving.

He said "taxes and increased global bureaucracy" would not lower emissions, but practical change driven by technology would. "You will also not reduce the number of coal-fired stations in the world today by forcing the shutdown of Australian coal mines and Australian jobs that go with them," Mr Morrison said.

"Other countries will just buy the coal from somewhere else, often poorer quality with greater environmental and climate impacts." He said a transition to lower emissions could be done "with-out sending jobs offshore".

In good news for Queensland's $1 billion petroleum and
coal seam gas industry, Mr Morrison said gas reserves would be key to any transition to more renewable energy in the electricity market. "Gas can help us bridge the gap while our investments in batteries, hydrogen and pumped hydro energy storage bring these technologies to economic parity with traditional energy sources. So right now, we've got to get the gas," Mr Morrison said.

"There are plenty of other medium or long-term fuel arrangements and prospects, but they will not be commercially scalable or available for at least a decade is our advice."

As well as taking "practical steps" in lowering emissions, Mr Morrison said adaptation would be necessary to deal with "the new norm" of longer, hotter and drier summers.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 30 January, 2020





Greenies hate rock climbers

Parks Victoria has vastly overstated the impact of cultural and environmental damage at national park sites amid fresh doubts about the campaign against Australia’s rock climbers.

For months men and women with clipboards, hard hats and hi-vis jackets have been quietly deliberating among the cliffs in the back blocks of the Grampians National Park, low-key participants in what has become Australia’s seminal public land access dispute.

With specialist surveying tools, the groups have been examining the environmental and cultural heritage impacts of well over a century of white Australian influence in a grand bush setting known to Aboriginal tribes for 22,000 years.

It is widely accepted that Parks Victoria and its predecessors have dropped the environmental ball in recent decades in the outer areas of the park, allowing the Grampians to be degraded by vandalism and at times cavalier behaviour that has alarmed indigenous and green groups.

However, just who committed much of the harm is wide open to debate, given the cross-section of people who visit the park every year from local towns, cities and overseas, arriving on foot, motorbikes, four-wheel drives and even from the air.

At the same time, Parks Victoria has picked an unprecedented fight with the Australian rock climbing fraternity, which has broad implications for recreational access to national and state parks across the country.

The impact, while not as symbolically significant as the end of climbing at Uluru, has the potential to snowball across Australia’s parks, ski fields, mountain biking tracks and climbing theatres as greater power is handed to indigenous co-managers.

With workers in the final stages of surveying large tracts of the Grampians land, Parks Victoria and the traditional owners are planning what sort of access climbers and others will have to the area, potentially maintaining or even widening the effective climbing ban on 500sq km of the park.

Within the current ban areas lie some of the world’s best rock climbing sites. Local businesses such as Mount Zero Log Cabins in the northern Grampians are ­reporting dramatic cuts in revenue, in the order of 25 per cent.

“I’ve got to tell you, I was a bit pissed off about the way Parks Victoria went about it,’’ businessman Neil Heaney tells The Weekend Australian. “They are picking on the wrong people … They (the climbers) are deeply respectful people.’’

There is broad acceptance in the climbing community that there is capacity for its members to overhaul some practices and a willingness to help address core ­issues such as the undermining of vegetation and the need to remove chalk remnants in key areas.

‘Smear campaign’

But there is also growing concern that the Parks Victoria narrative has been bolstered by a series of ­legally unverifiable, anti-climbing claims that included the false ­assertion that a climbing bolt had been put through art. In fact, it was past government workers who desecrated the site.

Valid questions are being asked about whether Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio has been ­accurately briefed about who is ­responsible for the most serious harm and whether or not climbers are victims of an excessive spin campaign.

Simon Carter, a climbing photographer with a global following, believes climbers are victims of a sophisticated campaign of vilification. “I believe climbers have been scapegoated to distract from far, far more serious impacts that are occurring to the cultural and environmental values of the park, appalling mismanagement and a sneaky move towards the commercialisation and commodification of our national parks,’’ he says.

“The legal determination ­behind it (the climbing bans) is based on observations and research undertaken at other locations, not based on anything that has actually occurred in the Grampians.

“Rock climbers have been wrongly vilified by parks staff or consultants in what I can only ­describe as a smear campaign based on absolute falsehoods.

“For example, rock climbers were accused of placing safety bolts into Aboriginal rock art. Climbers had done no such thing, not even close, but then Parks published a ‘bolt-in-rock-art’ photo on its website as some ‘evidence’ of climbers’ impacts. But the bolt had been placed by land managers, not climbers. It was a fabrication.

“And photos sent by Parks Victoria in briefing papers to the Minister for the Environment show chain-sawing of trees, fireplaces and other impacts that almost certainly had nothing to do with rock climbers.’’

Evidence doubts

Last March D’Ambrosio was sent a series of photographs from Parks Victoria chief executive Matthew Jackson purporting to show evidence of climber damage, except many of the photos Jackson sent to his minister failed to meet any serious legal test. Instead, what D’Ambrosio received was a series of pictures in which environmental harm had occurred, but with no actual proof of who committed the harm.

Yet this was crucial timing, ­occurring when the government had doubled down on the climbing community.

While different scenarios, the incident is similar to the photographs released by the Howard government in 2001 during the children overboard crisis. In this, there were photos showing that something had happened, but no serious evidence that supported the government’s narrative.

Of the eight images sent to D’Ambrosio, only one shows verifiable harm by climbers; this is of persistent use of chalk at one ­location to help people negotiate a climbing route.

No one would doubt this as climber damage; the rest show a fireplace with nobody around it, a log that had been cut with a chainsaw by an unknown person and some stone stacks created by someone who is not in the picture.

Several other images are of damage to vegetation at Venus Baths, near Hall’s Gap, which has become a popular site for the climbing discipline called bouldering.

What should have been articulated to the minister is that Venus Baths also happens to be one of the most visited tourism hot spots in the Grampians, three hours’ drive west of Melbourne. It is an easy walk for parents with young families, who have trampled through the area for many decades because it is in close proximity to the main town in the park.

Without addressing specific questions on the accuracy of the photographs showing climbing damage, Jackson said in an email: “Information and updates are regularly provided to the Minister for Environment as per standard briefing processes.’’

On the question of who is ­responsible for the damage, he said: “Parks Victoria has continually provided updates on direct recreational impacts in the Grampians to members of the rock climbing roundtable, including updates from independent experts of the impacts of rock climbing at sensitive rock art sites.

“Parks Victoria has specifically informed members of the rock climbing roundtable that not all recreational impacts are caused by rock climbers.”

Assault on art

Parks Victoria has been savaged by climbers and some local businesses for the unilateral bans, which were imposed without any meaningful warning, partly on the basis that the Grampians contain as much as 90 per cent of the indigenous rock art in southeastern Australia.

The Grampians’ Mount Arapiles — Australia’s rock climbing mecca — has just had a major outcrop declared out of bounds ­because of unspecified cultural heritage discoveries. Taylor’s Rock is one of the cradles of rock climbing education in Australia and is a key part of the adventure sport economy that underpins the nearby Natimuk community, 330km northwest of Melbourne.

Ben Gunn, an archaeologist and rock art specialist who recently wrote a paper on the effects of climbing in the Grampians, says he has no doubt who causes the most damage in the park. He also acknowledges that much of the ­indigenous art can’t even be seen with the naked eye and damage may be inadvertent.

“With the explosion of rock climbers in recent years, it is they who currently pose the greatest human threat to cultural heritage sites within the Grampians National Park and surrounding sandstone ranges and potentially to other national and state parks elsewhere in Australia,’’ he wrote with several authors including Jake Goodes, brother of football great Adam Goodes.

Gunn has outraged climbers by claiming that some in their midst were behind graffiti in parts of the wider park; again, climbers want to see the proof of this to a legal standard.

“Much of the graffiti in the Greater Gariwerd (Grampians) has not been produced by rock climbers,’’ Gunn wrote.

“In other instances, particularly at Lil-Lil, it is all too apparent that rock climbers are at fault. At Lil-Lil, some graffiti has been deliberately placed over rock art and the damage is permanent.

“Others have been racially offensive or, through the production of pseudo rock art, deprecating to Aboriginal people and the majority of non-Aboriginal Australians.’’

Chalking, he wrote, was classed as damage comparable to graffiti. Whether this claim about chalking as graffiti passes the legal test is questionable, particularly if people do not know there is art where they are climbing.

Australian Climbing Association Victoria president Mike Tomkins is open to overhauling some climbing practices to protect indigenous art, but says accusations of climbers writing over art and carving words into rock walls are false and unverifiable. “You can’t prove it. You cannot pin that on climbers. All the locations have been visited before there were even climbers,’’ Tomkins says.

While the climbing community has been divided about how to deal with the crisis, there is deep angst about the way the pursuit has been characterised. Climbers have congregated for decades at the Grampians and Mount Arapiles has traditionally been strongly green and sympathetic to the indigenous plight.

Others are highly sceptical, also, about figures used by Parks to suggest an unprecedented rise in climber numbers in recent years, arguing that while there is an uplift in interest, Parks Victoria has greatly exaggerated the number of extra climbers by misreading the statistics.

Uncle Ron Marks, a Wotjobaluk elder with close ties to Mount Arapiles and the Grampians, has worked in cultural education for decades, teaching about indigenous history. He wants a pragmatic approach that protects heritage, but enables people to go about their business in the knowledge that at Mount Arapiles, for example, the indigenous connection is long-running.

He warns the “kerfuffle’’ affecting climbing at both locations is having a clear impact. “You look at it from a business point of view, people are suffering,’’ he tells The Weekend Australian.

Meanwhile, climbers are locked in a form of political purgatory, with no clear line of sight to when the ascension to higher ground will be guaranteed.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here