LOL! Abbott and Bishop leading the Libs – Christmas has come early for ausculture!

First came the stocking fillers: Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate leader, belligerently traipsing Bob Carter, the one climate change denying scientist he could muster, across drought-ravaged country Australia telling farmers there was zero warming between 1958 and 2005! And then Steve Fielding calling for a Royal Commission into the climate change science* after a Senate deal to wrap up the ETS debate – “The temptation to weep with laughter is great” said Chris Uhlmann on Monday’s 7.30 Report.

And now the Liberal Party joins the Nationals to form a hilarious double-act of out-of-touch polices** and bombastic sound bites.

“Shit happens, Tony!” beams Tony Abbott on ABC’s Lateline

What the majority of the Australian public wants is a set of effective policies to address climate change, the effects of which are starting to look scarily catastrophic. That’s what we gave Labor a mandate to do. Unfortunately, Rudd’s been bowing to pressure from the worst polluters and promising them absurdly generous ‘permits to pollute’, something famously denounced by his own lead climate change advisor, Ross Garnaut, as well as The Greens and many others. Rudd has been trying to conjure up a scheme which no one really feels the effects of. Which, of course, defeats the whole point: if the tax on a packet of cigarettes was 20 cents just how many people would give up smoking?

Elsewhere in the developed world, conservatives have been supportive of emissions trading schemes. The EU, an alliance of 27 countries ranging from left- to extreme right-wing, already has one. Even the US has one, albeit watered down. Leaving Australia very much on the outer.

So as funny as it is to have a Leader of the Opposition who only a month ago said “I think the climate change argument is crap!”, at the end of the day the joke’s on us.

* Funny enough in itself – “Right, we need to summon Dr. David Suzuki to testify in Canberra – I mean, how are we supposed to accept him as a serious environmentalist when he keeps manufacturing petrol motorbikes?”

** Well, not so much policies as opposition to policies – all the more ironic as the Coalition would have brought in their own ETS had they retained power.

Image: ABC

Well, while a slightly disappointing 2.3% of blogs taking part in Blog Action Day 2009 were Australian, our involvement in today’s International Day of Climate Action is an impressive 4.2%. The day, organised by 350.org, involves a number of ‘actions’ – events in which people raise awareness of the new science showing that limiting carbon to 480 parts per million isn’t enough to prevent catastrophic climate change and that we need to urgently get it down to 350.

There are currently 4,800 actions lodged on their website globally, from 179 countries, of which our 201 make up the 4.2%. (Of course in theory 1 event could involve anywhere from one person to a country’s entire population, but it’s a fair guide.)

Nearly half of Australia’s events are taking place outside capital cities, but focussing on the capitals does enable me to compare participation around the country – the more events per hundred thousand people the higher the participation.

Hobart comes out on top, with Darwin a close second. Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra are all similar, at about half the participation. Brisbane is slightly below the previous three. Adelaide and Perth have less than a quarter of Hobart’s events per capita. Adelaide is the biggest surprise here – no resources boom to distract them and some fierce environmental impacts recently.

Then again, Adelaide doesn’t have The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald. The big surprise for Brisbane is that The Courier-Mail – a News Ltd. paper – has an environmentalist on the staff! And I’m not talking one of those woolly “lets protect the Great Barrier Reef because it’s good for tourism” types, I’m talking “you might want to think twice before chaining yourself to a coal conveyor belt because having a criminal record is no fun”. Graham Readfearn, ausculture salutes you!

The other News Corp papers will, of course, be running stories on today’s demonstrations. But don’t count on them to ‘waste’ a lot of column inches explaining the importance of applying pressure to the Rudd Government ahead of December’s pivotal conference in Copenhagen. That’s not in Murdoch’s script.

If you see lots of human 350s on the news and have questions, you’ll need to do the research for yourself. Future generations will be glad you took the trouble.

Image: 350.org

Today is Blog Action Day 2009. Many thousands of bloggers writing in scores of tongues are posting on this year’s subject – Climate Change – in an attempt to open up debate and inspire action.

There are few people left claiming that the climate is not changing, so there are two main camps: Those who believe the change is manmade and those who believe it’s part of a natural cycle. There is science to back both up. But why assume it has to be one or the other?

There are many natural cycles that affect our environment, not least of which is that affecting the thing that actually warms our planet – The Sun. Hot plasma moves in two great circuits deep within The Sun together known as The Great Conveyor Belt. When the area near the surface is hot and active sunspots form – small slightly cooler areas. There is a direct correlation: the more sunspots, the greater the intensity of solar radiation.

The Great Conveyor Belt has been determined by NASA scientists to have been travelling at around 1 metre per second steadily for the last century. However, now (based on sunspot observations) it has slowed, with the northern branch reduced to 0.75 m/s and the southern branch way down at 0.35 m/s. The result is that sunspot activity, which normally varies on a predictable 11 year cycle, is reducing, and the cycle is slowing down. NASA predicts the next peak of activity (after the current one) to be “off the bottom of the charts”, ie extremely low, with a corresponding reduction in The Sun’s output.

Graph showing NASA’s predictions for sunspot activity as of 2006 (Actual sunspot activity for current Cycle 24 so far is below that predicted)

As records for top temperatures continue to be regularly broken, such as the 46 degrees Celsius reached by Melbourne on Black Saturday this year, this is of great concern. If revised climate change projections are already close to ‘worst case scenario’ levels, as many climate scientists are saying, how bad will things get when solar output returns to normal levels? This might not happen for another 30 or more years, but happen it will. And if we haven’t done all we can to reverse manmade climate change by then... ...we’re toast!

Graphics: NASA Science; www.blogactionday.org

For the last two hundred years, we’ve been treating our agricultural land like English fields. Here’s a shocking revelation: it’s not.

Our land is one of extremes – long, dry periods followed by sudden floods. Where the old wetlands used to soak up the floodwater and save it for an unrainy day, now most careers down cleared creeks and the rest quickly evaporates. The dry topsoil then blows away, and the cycle of evaporation causes the land beneath to become more and more salty.

Nearly 30 years ago, farmer Peter Andrews realised that the moisture and topsoil needed to be retained and set about restoring the wetlands and biodiversity on his land. It worked.

The land on the right was farmed using Peter’s ‘natural sequence farming’ and that on the left was not. And the greenness is only half the story – the topsoil attained using his method is rich and deep.

Four years ago, we saw him on Australian Story and thought “Cool – an easy fix for our land degradation; one less thing to worry about.” But we hadn’t figured on the stuck-in-the-(dried-out)-mud dogma of The System. In many places legislation actually prevents farmers from retaining ‘weeds’ and allowing congestion in their creeks. Gotta get that water into the sea asap!

The fight has taken its toll on Peter. Australian Story has returned, and Part 1 tells a shameful tale of endemic resistance to change by The State. For all the optimistic vitality encapsulated in “Advance Australia Fair”, the reality is a bureaucratic machine that drags us down.

In Monday’s concluding episode (8pm, ABC1), we may discover whether he lets the bastards grind him down or takes up the wildly optimistic challenge to green the Sahara! Yeah, truth is definitely stranger than fiction!

Image: ABC

Unofficial tagline: ‘Giving ET an extra colon’

Welcome to the first extra:terrestrial, a look at environmental change as it relates to Australia, it’s values, culture and way of life. Or I might just find some beach volleyball jpegs and shove in a line about the increasing need for good sunscreen...

Today is World Environment Day 2008. (I’m sure it would be quite unkind to point out that the UN has allocated just one day of the year to this but an entire year to the potato.) The double-whammy of penning the words “...environmental change as it relates to Australia, it’s values, culture and way of life”, and doing so on World Environment Day is frankly freaking me out – not the way we roll round here. I mean I’m the kind of guy who’s much more likely to post a film review the day it closes than the premiere. If at all.

But I digress.

Australians live on a knife-edge ecologically. While there are vast expanses of land, most is unsuitable for agriculture or large-scale habitation. We have ‘cheated’ nature by using irrigation to make arid land fertile, but as the rains fail longer than any drought our food bowls are starting to become dust bowls.

Also on a knife-edge: the atolls of Tuvalu

The Woolworth/Safeway group has started placing ‘Fresh Market Update’ ads on TV to reassure customers that their storm-damaged Queensland fruit and dust-covered South Australian vegetables are still top eating. (The cheery spruiker also extols the virtues of the potato – the UN would doubtless be delighted.)

In A journey down the not-so Mighty Murray, the ABC’s AustraliaWide paints a graphic picture of a river system in crisis. Though not helped by mismanagement – “Y’now, all fairness to Karlene Maywald, the only thing she’d know about water is when she’s sitting on the toilet seat.” says fisherman Eric Hayward of the Minister for the River Murray – ultimately it’s lack of rain that’s causing the dropping river levels.

Just about the whole of mainland Australia below the tropics is affected, with even south-east Queensland on Level 6 restrictions. Victoria might like to think of itself as ‘The place to be’, but with Melbourne reservoirs down to 30%, it’s Tasmanians – who are using only 1% of their major river’s water – for whom things are going swimmingly.

The good news is that there’s been an amazing seachange in Aussie attitudes to the environment, and next time I might take a look at that. That’s if I can’t find the jpegs...