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  • Populate and we will perish

     

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    My view then was that Australia couldn’t have an immigration policy without first having a population policy. It hasn’t changed.

    The then minister for immigration, Phil Lynch, understood what I was on about. He set up an inquiry under Wilfred Borrie, but when Borrie eventually reported in 1978, no mention was made of population numbers.

    What surprises me is that Rudd has decided to support a massive increase without the matter being debated in public, the parliament, the party or the press. I am not alone in my concern.

    What advocates of big Australia haven’t yet done is spelt out clearly the benefits from such a huge population increase. In the early 1990s our annual growth rate, including immigration as well as births and deaths, dropped below 1 per cent. It is now, thanks to more babies and more people living longer, almost 2 per cent.

    With a population of 22 million, the deterioration in the quality of life in our cities is already obvious. Daily our media highlights the inadequacy of our schools, hospitals and transport system, housing and water shortages, and spiralling land prices. You don’t need to be an urban planner, demographer or sociologist to see the problems.

    If the 35 million predicted by 2050 is correct, with Sydney and Melbourne rising to seven million each, we are courting disaster. Double the population and life in the cities will be intolerable.

    No, no, say the big Australians, we can take millions more. We can but who will benefit? It is up to the big Australians to show how this will improve the quality of life for present and future generations of Australians.

    In the immediate post-war period, Australia, having just fought a war of survival with the Japanese, recognised that we could not occupy or defend a vast island continent with six million people. It may seem xenophobic today but fear of being swamped by the yellow peril before, during and after World War II was real enough. Most of these fears have now abated and, thankfully, with the end of the White Australia policy, most Australians recognise that our security is no longer dependent on increased population. If it is, what numbers will be necessary to repel the three billion who live to our near north? .

    The other reason given at the time was that a larger population would provide our manufacturers with the economies of scale. That may have had some validity then, but Australia’s economy now depends more on mining, tourism and agriculture as well as financial and educational services rather than manufacturing.

    The Prime Minister might also care to explain why the government is telling us we must reduce our carbon footprint while suggesting we should double the number of feet. We appear to be on two different planets. Some suggest that not to share our country with millions more immigrants is selfish and that we have the responsibility to help other countries to lighten their population load.

    Excuse me? What about helping them with population control?

    Why has it taken so long for this debate to take place? One reason is that the ethnic lobby brands anyone who questions immigration as racist. That won’t work with the type of people who are now entering the debate. People of the calibre of Dick Smith, Bob Carr and, if I may say so, yours truly can’t be so labelled.

    More and more Australians are speaking out on this issue and they will not be silenced out of fear of being blackguarded by those afraid to seriously debate the issue.

    The pundits suggest the federal election will be fought on the economy, climate change, health care and education. To that we can add population and immigration. It’s the big sleeper. Rudd and Tony Abbott take note. It will be a debate not about who comes to this country but how many.

    Barry Cohen was a minister in the Hawke government.

  • Abbott’s absurdity: “20 million trees” while libs destroy nations biggest forests.

    2 February 2010
    Abbott absurdity: “20 million trees” while Libs destroy
    nation’s biggest forests

    The Opposition’s plan to plant 20 million trees while
    its own Regional Forest Agreements foster the destruction of Australia’s
    biggest forests is incongruous, Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown said
    today.

    “The Howard government legislated the destruction of
    Australia’s biggest carbon banks – in New South Wales, Victoria,
    Tasmania and Western Australia, largely for woodchip export to Japan,
    converting these forests into greenhouse gases.

    “If Mr. Abbott or Prime Minister Rudd were to end the
    destruction they would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15-20%.

    “Planting 20 million seedlings while cutting millions of
    trees in mature forests is an Abbott absurdity,” Senator Brown said.

    Media contact: Erin Farley 0438 376 082
    www.greensmps.org.au <http://www.greensmps.org.au/>

  • Nasa mission to unravel sun’s threat to earth

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    Orbiting the Earth at a distance of 22,300 miles, the observatory will measure fluctuations in the sun’s ultraviolet output, map magnetic fields and photograph its surface and atmosphere.

    Experts have likened the mission to a “giant microscope” that will capture for the first time every nuance of the sun’s exterior. The images relayed to Earth will be 10 times clearer than high-definition television.

    Barbara Thompson, project scientist, said: “It is Nasa’s first weather mission and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on the Earth and near Earth.

    “We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts.

    “The key thing about the mission is that it is not just pure science for its own sake. There is likely to be a direct and immediate benefit for people.”

    Solar magnetic storms and space weather disturbances have had a number of dramatic consequences over the years.

    On March 13, 1989, millions of people in Canada and the United States were left without electricity for more than nine hours after a magnetic storm sent shockwaves through the Hydro-Québec power grid.

    Five years later, a geomagnetic storm temporarily knocked out two Canadian satellites and Intelsat-K, an international communications satellite.

    The most powerful solar storm in history, known as a “superstorm”, occurred on September 1, 1859. It caused the failure of telegraph systems in Europe and North America.

    The storm produced auroras — phenomena normally only seen near the poles — which were visible in Cuba, Mexico and Italy. The lights were so bright in California’s Rocky Mountains that gold prospectors mistook them for dawn and began preparing breakfast.

    Transpolar aircraft are particularly sensitive to space weather because they rely on navigation systems for the entire duration of a flight.

    Nasa estimates that the SDO will transmit as much as 50 times more scientific data than any other mission in the space agency’s history.

    Each image will consist of more than 16m pixels and the amount of data sent back to Earth daily will be equivalent to downloading 500,000 songs a day from the internet.

    In order to process the data, the organisation has set up a pair of dedicated radio antennae near Las Cruces, New Mexico.

    The SDO’s orbit will match the speed of the rotation of the Earth, meaning that it will be in constant view of the two 59ft dishes throughout the mission.

    The UK-based Science and Technology Facilities Council is supplying some of the equipment for the observatory.

    Professor Richard Harrison, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, said understanding the impact of the sun’s magnetic fields was key to the mission.

    “The idea is to image different layers of the sun’s atmosphere all the way down to the surface and measure magnetic fields,” he said.

    “The bottom line is that you are trying to understand how this atmosphere works. We can already see phenomena like the flares. The question is how does the magnetic field form to allow this sort of thing to happen

  • UK Government nuclear consultation ‘farcical’, say locals

    UK Government nuclear consultation ‘farcical’, say locals

    Ecologist

    29th January, 2010

    Local residents say they have been ‘insulted’ rather than ‘consulted’ over Government plans for new nuclear power stations

    Local campaign groups have given a damning verdict on Government engagement with local communities over its plans for new nuclear power stations and have called for a new round of consultations to take place.

    The groups, representing residents in ten of the communities earmarked by the Government as potential sites for new reactors, gave evidence to MPs from the Energy and Climate Change Committee earlier this week. 

    Jim Duffy, from campaign group Stop Hinkley, told MPs that the timing, advertising and location of the consultations had been unacceptable. 

    ‘DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) really didn’t seem to want to involve the local people. It seemed to be an accident if you happened to attend. The Government announcement on this came out on November 9th and the meeting was scheduled for 19th November,’ he said.

    Out of the blue

    Jenny Hawke, from the Residents of Braystone group, told MPs that the news that her area had been listed as a potential site ‘came out of the blue and was a complete shock.’ She said residents had received just ten days notice about the consultation, during which time it emerged that work had already begun on the site.

    ‘By the time we got to that meeting we found that RWE had already purchased an option to buy the necessary farm land and had already undertaken exploratory drilling on the farms,’ she said. 

    ‘I believe now that this consultation process is a total failure and falls far short of the Government’s own statements on public engagement. The short duration of the consultation on one of the most significant and complex planning decisions to be made this century renders the whole approach unacceptable and open to legal challenge,’ said Hawke.

    Farcical

    Peter Lanyon, of the Shutdown Sizewell campaign, called the DECC consultation ‘farcical’ and told MPs that residents in his community thought that the nuclear plan was a ‘done deal.’

    ‘Public consultations under the Aarhus convention are supposed to be a formative stage where there is still the possibility of changing things.’

    ‘The stuff that DECC are coming to down to exhibit and meet us about will just be a whitewash,’ he said. 

    Useful links
    Energy and Climate Change Committee

     

  • Barack Obama commits to climate change bill

     

    “This year, I am eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate,” he said.

    But Obama made it clear that he supported a “bipartisan” effort which would incorporate energy policies that are popular among Republicans – and fiercely opposed by the liberal wing of his own party.

    “That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies,” Obama said.

    The endorsement for nuclear power and especially offshore drilling will be difficult for some Democratic voters to swallow.

    Most of the instant reaction to the speech from environmental groups was positive – though few commented directly on Obama’s support for nuclear power or drilling.

    However, the Centre for Biological Diversity was scathing. “A clean energy economy does not include continued reliance on dirty coal and further risky drilling for oil in fragile offshore areas,” the centre’s director, Kieran Suckling said in a statement.

    “The president failed tonight, as he failed over the past twelve months, to use his bully pulpit to advocate a bright line goal for greenhouse gas reductions. “

    Obama’s endorsement of a nuclear renaissance – 30 years since the last new nuclear plant – was calculated to help the efforts of Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Lindsey Graham craft a compromise bill that could get broad support in the Senate.

    The house narrowly passed a climate change bill last June, but the effort has bogged down in the Senate.

    The two Senators told reporters earlier Wednesday that they were closely focused on pulling in Republican support, and damping down fears among Democratic senators from oil, coal and heavy manufacturing states that energy reform would hurt local economies.

    Obama hewed closely to the same strategy, peppering his speech with references to new “clean energy” jobs and the “profitable kind of energy”. He uttered the words “climate change” precisely once, referring to America assuming a leadership role in the negotiations to get a global deal to halt warming.

    But the president did voice support for a “comprehensive” Senate bill – code in Washington for a broad set of proposals that would also include establishment of a cap and trade programme.

    The nod for a “comprehensive” bill could help head off attempts to get the Senate to scale back its ambitions, and pass a narrowly focused energy bill that would not attempt to establish a carbon market.

    And he said he wanted a bill through the Senate in 2010 – timing that is seen as crucial both for the prospects of energy reform in America and for getting a global change deal.

    Obama also took a shot at climate change deniers, which brought some mutterings from Republicans.

    “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change,” he said. “But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.”

  • Global warming: Undeniable evidence

     

    There is plenty of room for argument about the rate at which the world is warming, the degree to which humans are culpable, the likely outcomes and the most effective steps to be taken. But there is not much argument about the big picture. The climate researchers at East Anglia were early in the field, but they were not alone. Their conclusions have been backed by scientists at the Met Office, from other British universities, and from the British Antarctic Survey; by oceanographers from Germany, California and Massachusetts; by planetary scientists from Nasa and the European Space Agency; by naturalists in a Europe-wide network of botanical gardens; and by climate historians, foresters, zoologists, palaeontologists, glaciologists and geographers on six continents. Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have repeatedly released findings that broadly confirm the same big picture, and for eight of the past nine years those researchers were funded by a Republican administration that would have much preferred to hear a different story. In 2001, the national science academies of 17 nations – including Britain’s Royal Society – urged governments to avert future calamity by agreeing to limit greenhouse gas emissions; within three weeks, the US National Academy of Sciences had joined the chorus, and begun to sing from the same hymnal. Although any single piece of evidence is open to reinterpretation, the mass of data assembled all seems to point in one direction: towards a warmer and increasingly uncomfortable world.

    Global average temperatures have gone on rising. Nine of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred in the past decade. In the past three decades, glaciers have receded at alarming rates in Alpine Europe, tropical Africa and sub-Arctic Alaska. The Greenland icecap has begun to melt and the north polar sea ice has become both smaller and thinner. The northern hemisphere growing season has been extended by 11 days. For reasons connected with human pressure, but also possibly with global warming, arid regions have become more arid, floods more catastrophic, hurricanes and cyclones more destructive. Millions of very poor people have been forced to abandon their homes, to kill their cattle, to walk away from their farms. Oceans have become more acidic, and coral reefs have been bleached. Forests have burned; rivers in the drier regions have slowed to a trickle, or dried up altogether.

    Some events may be considered as consequences of natural variation in a climate cycle, but the intensity and frequency of such extreme events is expected to grow as the world warms. The lesson to be drawn from the latest round of questions about climate science is not that scientists make mistakes, and could get the future wrong. It is that we still don’t know enough about our own planet, and should be spending more on research, instead of cutting science budgets. Knowledge is expensive, but wilful ignorance could cost immeasurably more.