Yesterday hail the size of golf balls fell on Canberra:
Windows, cars, gardens smashed. Already there have between 15,000 insurance claims made and it’s been declared a catastrophe. (Tough few weeks for insurers in Australia).
Canberra aims to be 100% renewables (but they aren’t cutting the line to the coal power). Will we ever find out how much the bill for the solar panel damage was?
One hundred and thirty three years ago:
h/t John in Oz.
… (Click to enlarge)
Queanbeyan is Canberra’s twin city, 15 minutes from Parliament House but in the next state. Long before Canberra was even founded, there were shocking hail storms. At a glance, terrible hail storms appear more common in summer.
January 7, 1871: Queanbeyan Hail of “large jagged shapes”, “bigger than pigeon’s eggs” shattered “hundreds of glass windows”, “cut ripe paddocks of wheat to pieces”, was “ruinous on fruit” crops, vine and trees. Many buildings were damaged. Hail lay in “deep drifts on the ground”.
Dec 29th, 1877: Extraordinary Hailstorm in Queanbeyan — large as “oranges” and “cricket balls”, cut through corrugated tin, killed “40 lambs”, knocked down foals, felled a horse. Left a trail of “terrible” destruction.
Dec 2nd, 1919: Destructive hailstorm: “on roofs with the noise of musketry, while others came with such force upon the ground as to bury themselves deep in loose soil, or to rebound from harder lodgements, especially the roads and streets, like tennis balls, two or three feet high…”
Feb 16th, 1956: Hailstorm Canberra’s Longest: …lasted 29 minutes. Some of the largest hail ever seen… “4.8 inches” fell on Yarralumla in 12 minutes. The hail caused “up to 100% losses in stone fruit”… “the most disastrous storm for many years”. 182 points of rain fell on the suburb of Griffith.
Big Government strangles our ecosystems just like it strangles scientific research. Australia has had 57 bushfire inquiries since 1939. We knew what was coming and we knew how to stop it, and we’ve known for eighty years (and indigenous people for thousands). Instead we paid a garrison of gravy trainers to not-read-those-reports and to create the exact conditions we knew would turn into a pyroconvective catastrophe. State Premiers missed a major threat to their people, their industry, our environment. On top of the death and destruction toll, just one industry, tourism, is looking at a $4.5b loss. Heads must roll. If they were misled, then name the names.
Our institutions failed us: The CSIRO didn’t save us, the ABC didn’t. What’s the point of them? Academics and CRC’s could’ve warned the nation, but instead most experts and the “reporters” said renewable energy would prevent these fires, even though climate change has made no difference to rainfall or droughts, which are driven by ocean currents, and solar cycles, not carbon dioxide. Let’s promote those who got it right, and turn off the tap to those that didn’t. Who pays damages? Who gets sacked?
Just do it: less fuel, less rules, more roads, more dams.Read Viv Forbes.
Cartoon thanks to Steve Hunter and the Saltbushclub
Government by Enquiry by Viv Forbes
Politicians hide behind enquiries – their magic answer to all problems, especially bushfires.
Announcing enquiries give the impression of decisive action, they generate fees for armies of barristers, lawyers and bureaucrats, and provide momentary excitement for the media.
The proposed 2020 Australian Bushfires corrobboree will provide a grandstand for the Climate Rebellion Mob who will get starring roles on ABC/Fairfax. Big business will probably propose a carbon tax to fight bushfires while foresters and land owners will hardly be heard.
When the final report is ultimately delivered, the media will be off trumpeting some new climate “emergency” to scare the public. The expensive new report will be quietly filed with all the others.
We’ve had at least 57 bushfire enquiries since 1939 – about one every two years. Anyone who bothers to read them will soon deduce what should be done. Nothing much has changed except there are more people living in fire prone zones with no protection, and more forest and private land was locked up with heavy fuel loads.
The current bushfire tragedy has occurred after 30 years of unprecedented government control of environmental policy at all levels of government. Many of these destructive policies have been imported under so called “international agreements”. As a result, ordinary Australians have been dragged into court for constructing firebreaks or removing dangerous trees on their own land. Governments and green advisers have assumed total stewardship of the environment and they own the results – massive destruction of lives, homes, property, animals and vegetation – over five million hectares and 2,000 homes burnt.
Here is a five point plan which should come from Bushfire Enquiry number 58.
Firstly, reduce the fuel load especially in national parks and forests by cool season burning, grazing, timber harvesting, slashing/mulching and collecting dead fire-wood. Appoint trained and experienced foresters to maintain safe and healthy public forests. Private landowners should also be enabled and obliged to become fire safe. Green-tinged politicians and bureaucrats have prevented or hampered all of these reforms.
Secondly, create and maintain wide clear trafficable roads, tracks and firebreaks through the forests and around towns and private properties. In fire seasons, these patrolled fire-barriers will help to confine any fire to one sector and provide a prepared line from which to back burn if there is an approaching fire.
Thirdly, build more dams and weirs to provide water for fire-fighting and to provide fire havens for humans, animals and vegetation. Increase penalties for arson in times of high fire danger.
Fourthly, abolish all restrictions on responsible management of “protected” vegetation reserves on private land – especially the private land sterilised to fulfil foolish government Kyoto Protocol promises or under government-enforced vegetation protection orders. Governments have created these fire hazards by trying to wrap vast areas of vegetation in cotton wool and green tape (both of which are flammable). Government “protection” of flora and fauna has proved to be the fiery kiss of death.
Fifthly, decentralise fuel and forest management out of the cities and into the regions.
City based politicians and bureaucrats have done enormous harm by locking up land and opposing fuel load reduction.
Decisions on vegetation risk management should be handed to property owners, park rangers, forest managers and rural fire wardens.
There is no useful role for the Commonwealth unless asked by States or regions for logistic support or to help fund bushfire training and fuels management. Otherwise it is better if Canberra politicians keep out of the way – send them all for a holiday in Hawaii. Viv Forbes
To download this article with all images click: Saltbushclub PDF
Viv Forbes has been an explorer, pastoralist and weather-watcher in Queensland and NT for most of his long life. He has lit fires (accidentally and deliberately), and he and his wife have fought fires and had their camps, fences and pastures wiped out by fires. They were both members of a local bush fire brigade for over 25 years. (Judy even had formal training).
Whose fault was it and will they get away with it (like all the other times)?
Twenty seven people died, a billion animals, 2,000 homes, tourism wrecked and a plume of smoke stretched from here to South America. Unless heads roll, this cycle repeats every 10 – 20 years. Imagine if the media was demanding to know how State Premiers had allowed this catastrophe, or if the opposition was accusing the government of listening to the Ivory Tower instead of the firies? The problem is, they’re all complicit. Both sides of politics are guilty, and the media didn’t see this coming either.
We can recognise those avoiding responsibility by the way they fob off hard questions:
1. Let’s blame “climate change” (because these fires are “normal” now, get used to it. Plus luckily no one ever says — “you mean it’s China’s fault?”)
2. Let’s say “now’s not the time to play the blame game” and,
3. Coming soon: “let’s wait for the Royal Commission, or Almighty Investigation, or 28th Fire Report” — or whichever comes last. (Who wants to preempt a report even if we already know what it will say. )
But we already know three State governments have not followed the advice from most past reports. They’ve ignored the fire and forestry scientists who warned them a disaster was coming and fuel loads were too high. They’ve ignored history. Bushfires in Australia are one of the most obvious dangers to live and health and yet few state leaders have bothered to understand them.
Roger Underwood AOM spent years in bushfire management, and was General Manager of CALM in WA (Conservation and Land Management). He is often asked “who’s to blame” and he points at the State Premiers, Minister and Public Servants who listened to university fools and not the bushfire scientists who said “a disaster was imminent” and who told them to clear the fuel.
At the top of the list are the premiers and ministers responsible for land management, such as it is, and bushfire policy, and the public servants in their departments with jurisdiction over forests and national parks. State governments in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have palpably failed to do the most important job they were elected to do: protect the lives and livelihoods of their citizens and the health of their environment. And their public servants have failed to do the job they are being paid to do: serve the public.
All Big-Government roads lead to death and destruction:
Yet despite the science, the evidence presented by bushmen, the dramatic history of this contininent’s relationship with fire, and the findings of numerous inquiries, successive governments in Qld, NSW and Victoria over the last 25 years have consistently failed to prepare potential firegrounds in the expectation of the inevitable. Not only this, they seem to have actually go out of their way to make things worse: the cut-backs to fuel reduction burning, the closure of access roads and trails in national parks, the decimation of professional forestry and fire management expertise, the turning of the blind eye to the creation of residential subdivisions incapable of being defended, the funding of “research” in the universities that is aimed at making the job of the firefighter more difficult, and the erection of a complex bureaucratic edifices that hinder sensible bushfire preparedness and make fuel-reduction burning almost impossible.
Local Councils are also responsible, but ultimately the State Government is responsible for allowing council nonsense. And State Governments are responsible for Crown land.
By destroying the forestry profession they dumped the job on volunteers:
One of the consequences of the deliberate destruction of the forestry profession and forestry district structures and crews has been that governments now have to fall back on volunteers to fight forest fires.
And, of course, we could have sold all those trees instead of having one big New Years Eve bonfire.
Underwood also describes something that sounds like a Water Bomber Cargo cult. He says it is a futile fantasy with fires this big, a profligate waste of money. During fires ten years ago, government spent $10 million dollars on using a DC10 brought over from the USA. The plane was so big it could only take off and land at Avalon airport in Melbourne. It needed a smaller lead plane to follow, and couldn’t land with the full $45,000 load of fire suppressant, so once it was off the ground it had to dump that stuff somewhere, on fields, or forests or failing that — on whales. If an academic isn’t already asking for a grant to study the effects of fire retardant on wildlife, they will be soon.
*Postscript: NC in comments points out most of the planes used are smaller, which is true, but they’re also impotent against a pyroconvective infero. Plus in a drought especially, Australia just doesn’t have handy Hoover Dams of disposable fresh water to drop on a million hectares of fire. But in true big government style — the DC10’s are so ineffective, we’re getting more of them, due to arrive on Jan 11 and Jan 18, which means, just in time for the rain.
Underwood doesn’t spare the Federal government either. They were warned too, but they choose to fund knee-jerk “suppression” and “recovery” projects rather than funding prevention and mitigation. I suspect there is a federal government role in carbon accounting which encourages wildfires against prescribed burns. But again, it’s state laws that stop people clearing native vegetation. What Royal Commission would untangle those knotted incentives?
This is an idea surrounded by layers of dumb. Like an onion, but not that smart.
Firstly, rejoice, nice big rain is falling, and Australians are Pretty Happy About That. But, oh no. Who knew, all along — the drought we thought was so bad was actually helping cool Australia. Golly, droughts cripple our agriculture industry and therefore reduce our agricultural emissions. It follows then (if you are crazy) that when the rain comes back that will raise our emissions.
Today is the first day I’ve seen the term “Drought-breaking” entertained…
But wait, there’s more. This rain is falling on Conservatives:
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are likely to rise if there is a break in the intense drought in eastern Australia, sinking the Morrison government’s goal of lowering emissions in the short term.
Yes, and in a world not obsessed with political power games, when rain falls, green stuff grows, sucking down the CO2. Nevermind.
The agriculture sector did most of the heavy lifting in emissions reduction in the year ending May 2019, falling by 4.2 million tonnes to 67.4 million tonnes. It reduced the sector’s greenhouse contribution by 5.87 per cent, compared to the electricity sector’s 1.15 per cent reduction.
“That big drop in agriculture was twice the emissions reduction that came from the record rollout of renewables. But it’s all built on the suffering of Australia’s farmers under drought,” Climate Council senior researcher Tim Baxter said.
And the emissions reduction from electricity was built on the suffering of electricity consumers.
Oh the dilemma, should we kill off our agriculture sector or our electricity supply?
“A break in the drought could push our emissions so they are again trending upwards,” Australian National University Climate Change Institute Professor Mark Howden said.
Professor Howden said while Australia’s emissions were “almost flatlining”, when the drought finally broke livestock emissions would likely rise by 4 million tonnes a year.
And therein lies the hard truth. All options are bad. All reductions are difficult.
And if the Sun controls our climate, all options are also a total waste of time.
Since CO2 affects the weather every day now, obviously, this is climate change rain.
” The Government tells Climate Change Deniers to stop arguing and accept The Science.”
ABC Prime Time News in Australia this week stooped to abject petty namecalling — claiming those despised climate change deniers are robbing Australia again. In reality, the people robbing Australia work for the ABC. If they only had evidence they wouldn’t need to stomp all over debate.
In other non-news — the Australian Science Minister obediently repeated a twenty year old robot meme that Al Gore invented. Unlike what the ABC headline and wording suggests, it doesn’t appear Karen Andrews mentioned “deniers”. That profoundly unscientific and inflammatory activist term seems to be all the ABC’s. And they call themselves “reporters”?
Those who are still debating whether climate change is real are wasting time.
The people wasting out time are the ones using vague, ill defined, unscientific terms to discuss the end of a debate that never began. What’s “climate change” mean to the listeners? Anything they like. What’s a denier, who knows, but it has the brain of a lizard.
It’s pure namecalling. It’s a science debate yet no one can define a “climate change denier” scientifically — what observations does a climate change denier deny? The original meaning of “denier” in 1475 was to deny God. Five hundred years later and nothing much has changed except to replace denial of one church with denial of other (or any sub part or sub-clause of the 10,000 page IPCC commandments.)
So the evidence is overwhelming, and has been settled for 100 years, but somehow Australians needed to hear this lite-tripe in their 7pm news?
Let’s accept that the climate has changed, the climate is changing.
Lordy I believe in ice ages…!
Between them, not one meaningful new concept was raised, no policy point was moved forwards. No one learnt anything except what they are allowed to say in polite company. It’s just a fashion update.
Andrews is naively hoping that capitulation will get the attack dogs off her back, but all it does is give them more to work with. Now the ABC and Labor Party (co-dependents in politics) can manufacture headlines saying how there is division in the Liberal Party, that even conservative MP’s “accept climate change is real”. They can isolate the real threats like Craig Kelly who they paint as marginalized, even though he’s the most popular conservative MP on Facebook, possibly even more popular than Scott Morrison, and definitely more popular than the opposition leader:
Sydney Morning Herald: Mr Kelly – who denies the link between human activity and climate change, … – uses his Facebook page to question climate science and spruik the coal industry on a daily basis.
Although the backbench MP has only 38,000 “fans” on the social media platform, compared to 231,000 for Mr Morrison and 124,000 for Mr Albanese, he regularly outperforms both men on engagement – particularly the number of people sharing his content.
Since July 1, there have been 1.33 million interactions involving Mr Kelly’s page, compared to 1.26 million for Mr Morrison and 720,000 for Mr Albanese. Mr Kelly regularly outperforms the Prime Minister, and there have only been three weeks since July 1 when the Opposition Leader had more interactions than Mr Kelly.
The term “climate change” is deliberately vague. Everyone agrees with the literal meaning of the words climate and change which means some kind of religious belief that humans have a convenient dial to control storms, clouds, rain, heatwaves and the sea, that they know what exact temperature “earth” should be, and that we can also measure that accurately, and that all countries agree on that particular level of storms and heat and sea level.
The ABC is afraid of debate. The Science Minister is afraid the ABC will mock her, but they already are, and this only feeds the bun-fest.
Hence both are happy with an interview where no one says anything except 20 year old propaganda lines.
Hook, line, stinker.
In the Iview WA News edition UK readers will be amused to hear that ” in the United Kingdom action on Climate Change is largely bipartisan. Boris Johnson took an ambitious climate target to an election and won. (2:45). Since Australians have added more renewables per capita than anywhere in the world, including the UK, and that’s been done by a conservative government here, “what’s the difference”.
Presumably the BBC says the same about Australians.
LATE ADDITION: Karen Andrews should know better, being a former Mechanical Engineering from QUT. (These Queensland universities have a lot to answer for.)
What the Science Minister said (blah blah, strawman, blah.)
Australia is wasting time debating the merits of climate change and should instead focus its attention on responding to the impacts it is having on the country, a senior Liberal minister has warned.
Science Minister Karen Andrews said it was time to move on from ideological battles, which she said had robbed the nation of the time and energy needed to respond to climate change.
“Every second that we spend talking about whether or not the climate is changing is a second that we are not spending on looking at adaptation [and] mitigation strategies,” she said.
“It really is time for everyone to move on and look at what we’re going to do.”
Ms Andrews, a former engineer, said the science on climate change was settled.
Proving that actual carbon reduction is totally irrelevant…
It doesn’t matter what any nation does. The CO2 blame-game is a fashion contest and success is not measured in megatons, but with megaphones.
Over the last 30 years, the Australian population has grown faster than nearly any other western nation on Earth. At the same time the Australian GDP more than doubled. Despite that and against all the odds of being a large, remote, thinly spread population which makes a living from industrial mining and agriculture and is further on Earth from anywhere, each Australian has reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by 40% each.
Emissions per capita and per dollar of real GDP, year to June 1990 to 2019
Australian per capita emissions reductions, Australian Greenhouse Office
Our national leaders need to start getting better at negotiating. They undersell our target and our achievements. Isn’t it time to talk “per capita”?
Details:
Over the period from 1989-90 to June 2019, Australia’s population grew strongly 49% ( from 17.0 million to around 25.4 million).
Australia’s real GDP (chain volume measures) grew 137% expanding from $0.8 trillion in 1989-90 to around $1.9 trillion in the year to June 2019.
Emissions from the electricity sector are experiencing a long term decline, down 15.0 per cent from the peak recorded in the year to June 2009. Emissions in the NEM for the September quarter 2019 decreased by 1.5 per cent on a seasonally adjusted and weather normalised basis compared with the previous quarter.[3] For the September 2019 quarter, generation from renewables increased 20.3 per cent primarily due to increases in wind generation (21.4 per cent) and solar generation (33.5 per cent).
As Joe Bastardi explained, there is an extreme Madden-Julian Oscillation going on north of Australia. We’ve launched into “Phase 5” with a rocket, and “wow” — things are far out on the phase diagram. Looking at past MJO patterns the wiggles can loop, dive to the centre, swing wildly out, though I didn’t see any with such an extreme phase 5. They can resemble the flight path of a bee. Predicting what any MJO does next looks difficult, and next week it may have retracted to low normal “six”. Who can say?
When will our BoM and Climate Experts correct the Fake Science and misinformation?
Climate change leads to a hotter-wetter world. This is a central canon of the theory of man-made global warming. Despite that, none of our paid experts are correcting the myths and misinformation of our public debate. Every man and his monkey (including M.P’s) are saying that Climate Change causes a hotter drier world which leads to fires, and the BOM, CSIRO and millions of scientists apparently agree. So if Australians are misinformed, who’s fault is it? — Not looking at you Andy Pitman, David Karoly, Tim Flannery, ABC Science Unit, Gergis, Sherwood, Trewin, Steffan and all the rest.
Blame the ocean currents for our bush fires
The biggest cause of bush-fires in Australia is the drought. A lack of rain allows the nation to get scorching hot days and dries out the fuel. Yet our long term records show that obscene megatons of CO2 from China has no detectable effect on our long term rainfall. Not in the fire zones, and not across the whole country either. The main driver of droughts and fires therefore is the El Nino oscillation, the IOD, and the SOI. Tax the ocean! Stop the currents! Hold back the tide and pray to Karl Marx!
Climate change made zero difference to rain trends in Australian fire zone
A half hour search finds six long records of rainfall in the latest bushfire zone but no sign of a CO2 signal. But, hey, it’s not like we pay the BOM a million dollars a day to correct misinformation, or the ABC three million dollars a day to ask them hard questions.
Long term rainfall in all these places is just like it used to be.
This is what a graph looks like when CO2 has no detectable impact on rainfall. 50% of all human emissions since the days of Neanderthals has been produced since 1992. But the rainfall is just like it was in the 1920s. 89 houses were lost in Cobargo, but they were lost because of land management and a natural drought.
While the rainfall in Dalgety appeared to increase slightly, the rainfall in Ensay appears to fall slightly. Since modelers have no skill in predicting regional rainfall trends anyone claiming either shift is caused by coal plants might as well be a fortune teller.
Climate scientists can’t explain why the rainfall was lower from 1920 – 1940 here so they have no idea if it’s just a natural cycle driving twenty year trends. There are natural cycles linked to solar cycles that are a complete mystery to climate modelers.
The longest records we have show cycles come and go. Since we can’t predict the cycles more than five months in advance (and often not even then), clearly we don’t know what drives these cycles. When will Australia’s climate scientists correct the politicians and celebrities who benefit from making false claims?
It’s not drier than the 1880s. Not drier than WWI. If there is any pattern it’s that there might be a long term natural cycle where there was less rain in the early 1900s, more rain after WWII and less rain again after the 1980s.
Looking at the 1900 – 2020 Australian rainfall trend map (which ignores the decades of data before that)much of Victoria has a 10mm lower rainfall per decade. But NSW, where most of the fires have burned so far ,, has exactly the opposite trend. Which one is climate change?
In Australia you can claim any trend you want in rainfall, just by cherry picking the start date.
Droughts are the same as they ever were
In the 178 year record, across the whole nation — there is no trend. All that CO2 has made no difference at all to the incidence of Australian droughts. Climate scientists have shown droughts have not increased in Australia. The graph here shows Sydney rain, but click the link to see Melbourne and Adelaide. Same thing. All the data we have, looked at in all the ways we can think of shows CO2 is not controlling our rain.
Rainfall trends, cycles, Australia, Sydney, Graph, 2019, 1840 – 2020. All the data we have, looked at in all the ways we can think of shows CO2 is not controlling our rain.
On Facebook no one knows you are a puppet — until a bug reveals who edits your posts. Such a bug happened on Thursday and by Friday people on 4chan had pointed out that Greta’s facebook posts were being done by her father and some guy in India called Adarsh Prathap.
GraniteGrok (or someone else?) revealed Adarsh is a UN climate official.
There is nothing either wrong or surprising about this. Only an idiot would believe (then or still) that she is writing her public remarks for delivery to social media or the UN. She’s a Muppet. A child trafficked in socialist environmental doomsaying. A prop. But who the heck is Adarsh Prathap?
According to LinkedIn, he is a Global Regional Coordinator at Youth Engaged in Wetlands. Principal Investigator of Revive Vellayani Project. And a big fan of the UN. Youth Engaged in Wetlands is “an international youth team committed to the conservation, protection, and wise-use of wetlands. YEW provides a global platform for young people to enable and empower them to help protect promote our wetlands.”
He’s a Green Energy player with UN connections. A stakeholder in the economic swindle that is the socialist Globalist environmental assault on the West.
Her father Svante Thunberg also posts material.
Greta’s Dad
But Greta’s Facebook account is not set up as a “fan page” it’s set up to look as if it is her account alone.
On Saturday Greta (or one of the two men) said they are her words “reposted”.
Greta’s handler, Adarsh Prathap
It reminds me of Obama’s twitter account which turned out to be almost entirely run by an activist group called Organizing for Action (OFA). Curiously OFA tweeted in the name of the man who was leader of the Democratic Party, but they are legally a non-partisan organization. Figure out how that works. Strangely, even once people knew the tweets were not his, they still quoted the twitter feed as if he said them.
I predict that no fans of Greta will unfriend her (or the two men).
“Clark et al. (2020) found 100% replication failure. None of the findings of the original eight studies were found to be correct.”
Scientists tried to repeat eight experiments that showed “acidification” would make reef fish get hyper, act like their predators smell nice, and generally swim in the wrong circles, behave weirdly and need therapy sessions. Turns out the fish will be OK, but James Cook Uni’s reputation may never recover. The original junk experiments and press releases came out of the coral reef centre at JCU.
This is the “replication crisis” Peter Ridd warned us about. He was fired from JCU in 2018 after stating that work from JCU’s coral reef centre (ARCCoE) was not trustworthy. He also helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish. Obviously this latest reef research shows he was right to be concerned about quality assurance at JCU. One JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden, and yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots. Indeed, two years on, JCU has not even officially appointed the committee to investigate her potentially fraudulent work. It seems JCU would rather employ untrustworthy scientists than honest ones.
Ridd won on every count in court against JCU last year, but they still want to waste millions in the high court defending their right to exile and punish a whistleblower for being non-collegial and writing a slightly satirical subject line: “for your amusement”. This unpermitted behaviour is seemingly so much more important to JCU managers than employing people who do honest, useful scientific work. And who cares about the stupid fish and the fate of the dumb reef anyhow? They are just a fund-raising tool for a grants machine. I guess JCU can’t maintain the abject fear among their staff, and get obedience to their own agenda if the dang staff say what they really think.
Think about how pointless the JCU appeal is — even if they were to win, they lose — they prove that they are not the kind of institute taxpayers should be funding.
JCU management have learnt nothing. Since losing the case JCU has changed its employment contracts, not to give their academics the unequivocal right to speak freely, but to make sure they can’t. Enough is enough — all universities need to guarantee free speech in employment contracts or no more government funds.
Every JCU employee’s work is tainted by this. Even the honest ones. We will never know what any JCU researchers really believe, or which results were filed in the bin, no matter what they say, because we know employees of JCU have to hide unfashionable opinions. Their quality assurance is terminally flawed. This makes the entire institution useless as a research body, and with standards so low, also useless for teaching. The government could fix this entire embarrassing debacle in five minutes. They just need to withhold JCU funding til the uni gets new management, investigates potential fraud, stops wasting funds in legal battles, and demonstrate that they support free speech — rehire Ridd, sack the VC Sandra Harding AO who earnt $975,000 in 2018, and enshrine free speech in employment contracts. It could all be fixed in time before the academic year starts.
Environmentalists should be defending Ridd. Junk science hurts the reef. The nation could waste money giving the fish counseling instead of solving actual issues that may threaten the reef.
And the problem is bigger than just JCU. As Ridd points out “Such replication studies have been opposed by all the major GBR (Great Barrier Reef) science institutions.” None of these institutions want the science checked.
It’s also proof that sacred “peer review” is as meaningless as a pal review by two anonymous people obviously would be.
JCU is the text-book example of what happens when government funding strangles science. The people in charge of JCU’s “science” department — deciding what “the consensus will be” are the administrators, not the academics.
This is not a one off. JCU has a pattern of evicting, blackbanning, and ousting people who disagree with the bureaucrats pet fashions (vale, Bob Carter!). In this culture, more funding means more strangling. So just stop.
Seven scientists expose massive scientific incompetence – or worse – at James Cook University
All the erroneous studies were done by scientists from James Cook Universities highly prestigious Coral Reef Centre. They were published in high profile journals, and attracted considerable media attention.
A thread for those who are watching the fire crisis.
NSW Fires today Map Click to enlarge
Victorian fires, click to enlarge.
Fires flared again today in Australia, though have calmed in the last few hours. Outback NSW was wildly hot (Bourke and Ivanhoe reached 47C and 48C), but the fires are mostly in Alpine and SE coastal areas of Australia where temperatures ranged on Friday only up to maximums of 21C – 35C.
Fire conditions are bad tonight in NSW and Victoria. Cooler, but windier. Some gusts are up to 100km/hr. Rain has begun to fall in East Gippsland. Map details and links to updates are listed below. It’s obvious in the maps that massive areas of forest have already burned. The black areas on these maps are burnt, but not all to the same degree. The red areas on the NSW map look terrible but these are “potential spread areas”.
It’s not about the heat.
The fires are where the fuel loads are (and the arsonists and accidents).
There is a strong phenomenon called the Madden-Julian Oscilation (MJO) happening over the Indian ocean North west of Australia.The MJO is a massive convective pattern that churns it’s way from west to east across the Indian and into the Pacific. For 30 – 60 days it’s a dynamo, changing global weather. It has a profound influence on both sides of the world — driving cold winter spells as far away as Canada and the US.
“It’s as extreme as I’ve ever seen it” — Joe Bastardi, Weatherbell, Jan 6th
“I’m looking at one of the worst 30 days periods in central Canada and western United states.”
“I’m watching what I was taught happen in front of me.”
” Jan 20 – Feb 10th may be very cold in the US.
Joe Bastardi is a long range weather forecaster at Weatherbell and he does a weekly video each Saturday. Last weekend he discussed the MJO and the hot tropical convective pattern occurring in the NE Indian ocean off Australia where, unusually, there are no clouds. The gap in the clouds allows sunlight in to heat the ocean in the tropics, but also allows the warmer ocean to radiate energy out to space. The outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is pouring out across the equator in the central and western Indian ocean.This makes cyclones and rain more likely off NW Western Australia.
Bastardi loves the climate and his enthusiasm is infectious. Bear in mind it’s six days old now, things will have shifted. It must be tough making a living out of trying to predict the weather weeks in advance…
There is more energy involved because the oceans are warmer, yet there is severe cold in parts.
The heat is pouring off the planet at 35W/m2 at 90E in the tropics. (That brown blob in the Indian Ocean). But it’s being followed by storms, clouds, cold and rain.
Three months of very few clouds over the NW Indian Ocean.
We all wonder, of course, what drives a 3 month period of very few clouds in the tropics … could it be a solar phenomenon — a shift in the solar wind for example.
Joe Bastardi on the effects over the USA
If the MJO gets into 8 (in the chart below) 1 or 2 don’t be surprised if it hits -10 in Chicago.
Most of the West and Central US will be cold, but the pool of cold dense air will lead to storms from the gulf across SE USA.
The man-man global warming theory predicts more water vapor, so there should be more clouds, not less in the tropics.
Madden-Julian Oscillation is a pattern that travels east bringing storms and rain and influencing weather right around the globe.
The cloudless warm water cell in the MJO pushes through this pattern from 1 to 8. Right now it’s at 4 (or it was a week ago). Let’s hope it brings some rain to Australia.
It is a large-scale coupling between atmospheric circulation and tropical deep atmospheric convection.[1][2] Unlike a standing pattern like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Madden–Julian oscillation is a traveling pattern that propagates eastward, at approximately 4 to 8 m/s (14 to 29 km/h, 9 to 18 mph), through the atmosphere above the warm parts of the Indian and Pacific oceans. This overall circulation pattern manifests itself most clearly as anomalousrainfall. — Wikipedia
At some point Bastardi comments to the effect of saying something like…. I’m not seeing evidence that man-made CO2 is driving this, but I am seeing solar influence.
Any mistakes in the transcript or “translation” above are all mine. Apologies!
Omeo . Image courtesy of Department of Environment and Primary Industries, Victoria. More photos
Those who don’t know history…
On Black Friday 1939, on a day of high wind and savage 45 degree heat (110 Fahrenheit) many separate fires joined forces in Victoria to make mass conflagrations, one of which burned most of the western flanks of the Snowy Mountains all the way to New South Wales. In the end the conflagration burned through two million hectares, 3,700 buildings, 69 mills and killed 71 people. Five towns were completely destroyed — never to be rebuilt. At the time, the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide was 310ppm and 90% of all human emissions were yet to be made. Climate Change has nothing to do with it.
In the end, they were horribly unprepared, the forests were horribly overgrown and the weather was horribly extreme.
Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.
The Stretton Royal Commission into the Black Friday fires found that it “almost all fires are caused by man”, and recommended among many other things, the “common bush practice of controlled burning to reduce risks”. The Commission (as well as the fires) had far reaching effects: spawning roads, firebreaks, dams, aerial patrols. A radio network was set up that was considered better then than what the police and military had (think… that was 1939). The Forests Commission more than doubled the area it was managing.
The report makes for interesting reading: the populace were struck with apathy, letting things become overgrown too close to town. The Board of Works believed planned burns were a bad idea and let the forest manage itself naturally. The people and industry were careless, lighting fires for all kinds of reasons, flagrantly flouting laws they disagreed with or felt were silly and unenforceable. The Minister kept half the funds of the Forestry Commission, and lots of people told a version of the truth that best served their own interests. How nothing changes.
Various Departments competed and fought among themselves and Stretton wanted ” to expose and scotch the foolish enmities which mar the management of the forests by public departments, who, being our servants, have become so much our masters that in some respects they lose sight of our interests in the promotion of their mutual animosities.
Thanks to David B for sending in these excerpts. I’ve read quite a bit of the report though, no doubt there are plenty more gems to be found. There is some reassurance there knowing that government was just as inept, corrupt and incompetent then. Though we have less excuse…
VICTORIA REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION TO INQUIRE INTO
The Causes of and Measures Taken to Prevent the Bush Fires of January, 1939,
and to Protect Life and Property AND
The Measures to be Taken to Prevent Bush Fires in Victoria
and to Protect Life and Property in the Event of Future Bush Fires.
“There had been no fires to equal these in destructiveness or intensity in the history of settlement in this State, except perhaps the fires of 1851, which, too, came at summer culmination of a long drought.
“Balls of crackling fire sped at a great pace in advance of the fires consuming with a roaring explosive noise….”
“The speed of the fires was appalling. They leaped from mountain peak to mountain peak, or far out into the lower country, lighting the forests 6 or 7 miles in advance of the main fires. Blown by a wind of great force, they roared as they travelled. Balls of crackling fire sped at a great pace in advance of the fires, consuming with a roaring, explosive noise, all that they touched. Houses of brick were seen and heard to leap into a roar of flame before the fires had reached them. Some men of science hold the view that the fires generated and were preceded by inflammable gases which became alight. Great pieces of burning bark were carried by the wind to set in raging flame regions not yet reached by the fires. Such was the force of the wind i hat, in many places, hundreds of trees of great size were blown clear of the earth, tons of soil, with embedded masses of rock, still adhering to the roots ; for mile upon mile the former forest monarchs were laid in confusion, burnt, torn from the earth, and piled one upon another as matches strewn by a giant hand.”
“On that day it appeared that the whole State was alight.
At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps, worked to make safe their families and belongings Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land there was daytime darkness,. At one mill, desperate but futile efforts were made to clear of inflammable scrub the borders of the mill and mill settlement. All but one person, at that mill, were burned to death, many of them while trying to burrow to imagined safety in the sawdust heap. Horses were found, still harnessed, in their stalls, dead, their limbs fantastically contorted. The full story of the killing of this small community is one of unpreparedness, because of apathy and ignorance and perhaps of something worse. Steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire. Sleepers of heavy durable timber, set in the soil, their upper surfaces flush with the ground, were burnt through. Other heavy woodwork disappeared, leaving no trace. Where the fire was most intense the soil was burnt and destroyed to such a depth that it may be many years before it shall have been restored by the slow chemistry of Nature. Acres upon acres of the soil itself can be retained only by the effort of man in a fight against natural erosive forces.”
“Millions of acres of fine forest, of almost incalculable value, were destroyed or badly damaged. Townships were obliterated in a few minutes Mills, houses, bridges, tramways, machinery, were burned to the ground; men, cattle, horses, sheep, were devoured by the fires or asphyxiated by the scorching debilitated air. Generally, the numerous fires which during December, in many parts of Victoria, had been burning separately, as they do in any summer, either ” under control ” as it is falsely and dangerously called, or entirely untended, reached the climax of their intensity and joined forces in a devastating confluence of flame on Friday, the 13th of January. On that day it appeared that the whole State was alight.”
“These fires were lit by the hand of man.”
The prelude — creeks ran dry and the litter was bone dry
Recent Comments