Antarctic’s future in doubt after plan for world's biggest marine reserve is blocked

A plan to turn a huge tract of pristine Antarctic ocean into the world’s biggest sanctuary has been rejected, throwing the future of one of the Earth’s most important ecosystems into doubt.

 A humpback whale shows its flukes while feeding in Antarctic waters.

Environmental groups said Russia, China and Norway had played a part in blocking the proposal, with the other 22 members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the organisation set up to protect Antarctic waters, backing the proposal.

The 1.8m sq km reserve – five times the size of Germany – would have banned all fishing in a vast area of the Weddell Sea and parts of the Antarctic peninsula, safeguarding species including penguins, killer whales, leopard seals and blue whales.

Read the story from The Guardian by environmental reporter, Matthew Taylor - “Antarctic’s future in doubt after plan for world's biggest marine reserve is blocked.”

No record of some threatened species in area government says it's protecting them

Experts have cast doubt on government claims the Coalition is funding a conservation project in Victoria’s Endeavour Fern Gully to benefit threatened species – because the listed species are unlikely to occur in the area.

Growling grass frog unlikely to be found at Endeavour
Fern Gully, despite Josh Frydenberg saying so

Endeavour Fern Gully is a 27-hectare (65 acre) rainforest property on the Mornington Peninsula. The environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, says the government had funded a broad Green Army project that “improves habitat through weed control and promotes greater conservation awareness of native vegetation in remnant bushland at Endeavour Fern Gully”.

“This is where a number of threatened species are known or likely to be, including the grey-headed flying-fox, the southern brown bandicoot (eastern), the growling grass frog and the clover glycine.”

Read The Guardian story by Lisa Cox - “No record of some threatened species in area government says it's protecting them.”

Expert views make way for political expediency in climate debate

The patient's vital signs are not good. Power prices are high, and emissions haemorrhaging. Reliability and security of supply are in doubt. We need a treatment plan, and fast.

A Clean Energy Target would help make sure that
as ageing coal-fired power plants are retired,
 there is enough investment in renewables to replace them.

Such was the diagnosis of the national electricity market on Monday by Australia's chief scientist Alan Finkel, the man whose blueprint to improve the system was supposed to take the politics out of energy policy. So, how's that working out?

The answer is, pretty poorly. In his speech to the National Energy Summit on Monday, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg gave the strongest hint yet that the prospect of any clean energy target was dead and buried, claiming the falling cost of renewable energy meant the subsidies were no longer necessary.

Cue the cycle of politicking and tail-chasing that has wasted more than a decade of Australian climate policy, frustrating the business community and leaving the public wondering: is any leader capable of stopping the bleeding?

Read Nicole Hasham’s comment in today’s Melbourne Age - “Expert views make way for political expediency in climate debate.”

Energy market operator says Liddell doesn't have to stay open, as Tony Abbott casts doubt on Paris pledge

The Turnbull government's insistence that the ageing Liddell coal-fired power plant must stay open longer has been cast into doubt by the operator of Australia's electricity market, who says there are other ways to head off a predicted power shortfall.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Environment
and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg. 

Australia's energy quandary dominated question time on Thursday, as the government and Labor tussled over who was responsible for rising power prices and how best to deliver a reliable, affordable power supply.

Appearing at a hearing in Canberra on Thursday, Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Audrey Zibelman said battery storage, renewable energy, management of consumer demand and upgrading existing power plants could all help meet a predicted 1000-megawatt shortfall in flexible, dispatchible capacity – power that can be created on demand – when energy giant AGL closes its Liddell power plant in 2022.

The Turnbull government is pressuring AGL to keep the Liddell station open for five more years. However, the power company insists it has no plans to sell the plant or keep it open.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Energy market operator says Liddell doesn't have to stay open, as Tony Abbott casts doubt on Paris pledge.”

Climate change is real, but what do we do now?

-       Robert McLean

Climate change, a reality beyond doubt and questioning, but what do we do now?

Most public discussions about the seriousness and impact of climate change prompt the inevitable question: “What do I do right now?”

Rarely, if ever, have those on the panel - a panel frequently made up of world-renowned climatologists and others with anthropological skills, social knowledge and many with an acute awareness of the finitude of the world’s sinks and physical resources - articulate a clear answer of doable things; an action plan for the ordinary man,

The given answer usually follows by an unsettling pall of silence.

I suspect most on most panels know the answer, but as scientist or others of a similar ilk, their training and the instinct it imbues them with, tend to avoid such prescriptive answers.

Beyond that, the answer that might be lurking deep in their minds is contrary to the laisse-faire way of living that has lifted humanity to hitherto unseen standards of living, particularly in developed countries.

Not only are we facing the challenge of reducing our carbon dioxide emissions to zero, but somehow we have to go beyond that point to a negative position.

Doing that requires such a change to modern lifestyles that even the boldest of climatologists and those who understand the complications of climate change dare not speak the truth – it is, as Al Gore once said: “An inconvenient truth”.

We continue to chat, we continue to procrastinate, we continue to listen too closely to the doubters and frequently believe the stories they peddle, and while we do little, climate change continues further into zones over which humans are unable to inflict any influence.

However keeping a watch on what is happening is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose report: “2013 State of the Climate: Humidity” helps us understand a little more about the unfolding challenges.

Doubt used to defend concussion and climate change

Brisbane's John Brown,
has a history of serious
head injuries.

Concussion and climate change seem unrelated and although they might well be, the same tactics are being used to protect the status quo.

Those antagonistic to the idea of climate change have sewn doubt in the minds of people at every opportunity in an effort to ensure the maintenance of business as usual.

Their efforts have been rewarded as those industries and the behaviour of the developed world have changed little, procrastination has been rife and the profits of the wealthy have continued unbridled.

Concussion arising from clashes in contact sports all around the world has long be a concern for many and prompted even more discussion following a recent decision in the U.S. in which some 4000 gridiron players received a payout of nearly $1billion in an action against the NFL, alleging the league mislead them about the risks of long term brain damage from concussion.

Many are worried about developing a disease known as CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which causes early onset dementia.

Interestingly those eager to see that people understand the complications for those participating in contact sports have bumped into circumstance similar to those that confront climate change advocates and before that, those working to convince smokers that their habit was killing them.

Sporting bodies, particularly the AFL in Australia, are busy engineering doubt in the minds of many; doubt that will engender delay and so protect the status quo.

“The Concussion Games” were discussed on Radio National today.

'Inconvenient truths' swamping Tony Abbott

by Robert McLean

       Most of us are susceptible to endorsing something we instinctively approve.

 Kenneth Davidson.

Conscious of that, each of us needs to approach what we read with caution as without care we can be swept along by a current of thinking. Global warming is typical of that, but when examined in the hard, cold and sceptical light of true analytically consideration, it can be shown to be correct.

The skeptics/doubters want us to believe otherwise and of course they would for when you “follow the money” they are funded almost entirely by the fossils fuels industry, the villains in the climate change conversation.

For most of the past decade, global warming has been fundamental to my intellectual diet and years ago it became obvious to me that it was human-induced and rather waste further time debating its existence and cause, we needed to be preparing our communities, and more widely society generally, to survive in a decidedly different future.

Still, there lingered this nagging concern that I was being swept up by this scientific enthusiasm that appeared remote from society generally and most in my community.

Events of the past five years have removed any doubt – civilization is in desperate trouble and the severity of what is ahead appears to be beyond the intellectual capacity of our leaders, be they local, state or federal, for the first priority of all appears to be to protect the economy, which, in reality, has little to do with the ongoing welfare of civilization.

The economy, a human construct, as we understand it today is about making certain our wants are answered, when in reality it should be about answering our needs.

Humans are aspirational, and that is fine, but those aspirations have become distorted and are about enriching a few, rather than answering the needs of billions.

Apologies for the rant, I simply set out to point toward a comment piece in today’s Age by Kenneth Davidson headed: “Tony Abbott’s rising tide of inconvenient truths”.

However, despite Tony Abbott and his cohorts dragging us back into the 1970s we should not be too disheartened for many things are happening in our communities through which people are attempting to steer our society toward some workable solution.

I am decidedly pessimistic that the Australian Government will do much to counteract what is happening to our climate, but I am optimistic the Australian people will work their way to answering this profound difficulty.

 

Gathering Beneath the Wisteria is about education and survival.

Those of us who accept the reality of human-induced climate change and gather Beneath the Wisteria in Shepparton’s Maude St Mall might be the only ones left standing should we take seriously a report today (July 12) on the ABC.

Those towns with the lowest educations
 levels face the greatest threat from
climate change.

A story headed: “Climate change scepticism could wipe out rural towns”, argued that 100s of rural Australia’s inland towns could cease to exist by 2050 if those living there did not adapt to our changing climate.

It was argued in the story predicted that those towns with a general low education level would fare the worst.

Many country towns had a lingering scepticism about climate change and that doubt had the potential to “de-populate” entire towns.