The Dappled Planet

It was with increasing horror we read of the people who died in the bushfires in Victoria last weekend. Bush fires have always plagued the outskirts of cities and rural communities in the southeast and to a far lesser extent, the southwest of Australia. But never have the horrors been visited upon the local residents like the results of this wave of fires! A true firestorm must have raged through the tree tops, fueled by high speed winds for people to have been unable to flee a fire in their cars.

However what irks us at the Dappled Planet are the articles coming out now blaming global warming and ’strong calls’ for the Prime Minister to impose stricter CO2 emission on the Australian populace! Lives were LOST and families torn apart this last weekend - horribly and tragically because of bushfires. But lets get one thing clear - bushfires are a part of the Australian ecosystem and have been a part of the ecosytem for million of years before man even set foot on the continent.

Calling for stricter controls on CO2 emissions won’t prevent anothe disaster like this one happening. It is irresponsible of the media to call for this. What WILL prevent disasters like this from happening again are things like banning people from building homes in the dry, bushfire prone forests of southern Australia, or enforcing that anyone who builds in areas with property surrounded by dense trees, have a a fire-proof bunker.

Asking for CO2 emission to be reduced may in 50 or 100 or 200 years time have a minor impact, but how many more lives will have been lost by then as a result of people wrecklessly building in Australia’s dry forests over the next 10 or 20 years while they wait for reducing CO2 emissions to have an effect??? Since the Australian city dwellers of Sydney and Mebourne started bushing deeper into the bush to have a rural retreat within an hours drive of a city, they have endured bushfire diasters with (until this disaster) upwards of 70+ people killed at least once a decade.  If people want to live through these fires, then blaming climate change is not going to save lives in the future - the frequency of bushfires in Australia is frequent enough naturally (but exacerbated by arsons which seem attracted to city dwelling) that we can’t wait several decades for a small, quite possibly negligible  effect caused by reducing man-made CO2 emissions.

Man maybe contriburing to global warming, but its calls like this which make us smoking hot under the collar… When there is a solution which has a far quicker and positive impact than global warming, why do the media and environazi’s always try to ram global warming down our throats? Surely it is better to question people’s  ongoing desire to leave in densely wooded areas of Australia which have evolved to be regenerated by natural bushfires? Surely is better to mandate fire proof bunkers in these communities? Surely it is better to mandate firebreak areas around communities - and not then succumb to a false sense of security and allow people to build in the firebreak areas when there are no fires for a couple of decades?

But the last thing that we should be doing is focusing exclusively on a reduction in CO2 emissions in an effort to prevent such a disaster ever happening again. People should not have unwillingly have lost their lives to only have people focus on long term solutions when so much more can be done to prevent these diasters in the near future as well.

February 11th, 2009 | Tags: australia, bushfire, change, climate, death, fire, global, lives, warming | Category: Disasterous Solutions, global warming, population | Leave a comment

At the Dappled Planet, we know the British newspapers are quite possibly the best in the world for doing their utmost to create hysteria based on nothing but the flmisiest of flimsy facts. And the one which seems to hype up flimspy facts and scream to the gullible public about the terrors out there to kill us all is no better exemplified than by The Telegraph. No claim is to small to be sensationalised and blown completely out of proportion by The Telegraph…. One member here spent 6 weeks in a place where the only English paper was unfortunately, The Telegraph, and they gave up reading it in disgust after 3 weeks because there was never a good thing to report and an awful lot of rubbish!

So it was with bemusement that we saw an article in The Telegraph published on the 28th December proclaiming that 2008 was actually the year of global cooling. In fact, if nothing else, he just  re-iterated a bunch of ’stuff’ which scientists reported throughout the year - and if they were lucky, actually got some media coverage for it. But it was all ’stuff’ that said “Uh oh… The temperature of the world doesn’t rise every single year after all! It just did for the last 10, but now… inexplicably (or for those scientists now predicting it will mellow out for the next decade), it didn’t rise in 2008…?!”

Of course, in the scientific world, the conditions of any scientific observation/experiment very rarely do follow a straight line up - or down or horizontally or whatever the media thinks it should be to make it easier for their viewers/readers to understand. On the bright side though, it allowed the author, Christopher Booker, to point out some things which allowed our planet a respite from the heatwave which has apparently been inflicting us for the last 150 years.

Intrigued (and somewhat chastened after reading the book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre who although clearly after distortions in the media by professionals of medical bent, but who’s main point was that we should check out the facts for ourselves…) we looked up Christopher Booker. By following a link on The Telegraph website, we found other articles by him. Clearly a journalist who likes to stir things up! Quite often, he just may be a voice of reason…  But when we delved further, past his career at The Telegraph and looked up his bio at Wikipedi, it turns out he’s made his fair share of contraversial sensational unsupportable claims in the past and to cap it all of, is not a scientist at all, never was and has no formal training in it. But he is a journalist.

Well, credentials aside, a lot of what Booker reported on was actually churned out by scientists during the year. It’s probably going a bit far to say one year of cooling temperatures meant man was not causing global warming - there are always fluctuations in our weather record.  And the reality is far more complicated than that and in our opinion, Man is contributing to climate change in both cooling and warming capacities, but probably not significantly enough to have a big say either way, and even if we were, in the grand scheme of things, it would be ’short term’ as our fossil fuel reserves won’t be around much longer anyway. But we do need to get a bit more with it on adapting to climate change and managing the environment!

However, getting back to Booker’s story, what really bemused us here was that for whatever reason, The Telegraph must have felt they didn’t create enough of a stir on their abrupt reversal on searing heatwaves plagueing the planet for the rest of the century assuming rising sea levels didn’t engulf us first (Noah, where is your ark? We are going to need it!).

No. What really made us chuckle was The Telegraph reprinted the article 2 days later - this time claiming that their journalist Christopher Booker single handedly proved to the world that global warming didn’t exist - and then reprinted his article so that we’d all get it. Booker has saved us from rising sea levels and tropical temperatures!

The Telegraph must have decided they wanted to start a trend this time - and it was going to be global cooling. So for the short term, we would imagine we can expect The Telegraph to only churn out articles about glaciers advancing and Finalnd disappearing under glacial ice sheets and how everyone will be living in the dust bowls of Africa by the end of the century…??? No? Ok. I am sure there is a journalist on their staff who will happily take the first sign of spring in February  to mean global warming is happening all over again as average daily temperatures exceed those of one month ago! Stay tuned…

January 1st, 2009 | Tags: articles, change, claims, climate, cooling, global, media, reporting, telepgraph, warming | Category: global warming | Leave a comment

If you really want to save the world, then its a little frustrating right now. If you really know your stuff, and it runs counter to the media’s interpretation of events, then its even more frustrating.

The market meltdown has been horrifying to watch - but the American government response has been even more horrifying. But even more fascinating, is the media interpretation of it all - and the wilingness of the politicians to listen to the media above all else. What happened to the days they listened to the people who voted them in? Their advisors who said, “If you do this, you are going to cause far far far more harm than good in the long run?” To date, this has culimnated in the highly unpopular ‘automakers’ bailout… Something the majority of electors were against - and lets face it, 2 things are very evident from this bailout: (1) To restructure, people are going to loose jobs (so objective one of the bailout is not achieved) and (2) the collapse of 3 car makers in the world is not going to cause a collapse of the entire financial system as the banks were threatening to do!

And depressingly, media misprepresentation is increasingly becoming the same way with the environment. Earlier this week, a member at The Dappled Planet read an article by an Associated Press journalist who preached the world was coming to an end thanks to anthropogenic man-made CO2 emissions.  Many more scientists got upset at being misrepresented accussed the AP of being irrational. Associated Press refused because they believed anthropogenic global warming was occurring (in a nutshell).

However, the responses to that report still echo around on the web. Newsmax went off and found several equally eminant scientists to give their point of view which basically equates to there is a lot of unnecessaery hysteria about global warming. Another entry at at stinkyjournalism was also incensed and wondered if this was a result of Associated Press’ new ‘accountability journalism’ described at The Digital Journal where essentially the new Associated Press reporting guidelines involve basically an endorsement to journalists to “bias your writing any way you see fit to make it sellable…

And then a reporter for the Calgary Herald got upset at how the media was also mis-reporting a Climate Change conference in Poland this week. Facts followed in their article…

It would seem both the American media and the American politicians are getting God complexes here and truly feel that whatever their gut feeling is, that is the way to go and people who don’t feel the same way are just stupid.  Maybe they’ve been to one to many ‘management’ courses which say all great leaders run on instinct and creative impulses and not by listening to people saying ‘you can’t do that!’ That maybe so, but even these ‘great leaders’ make mistakes and more importantly, they aren’t formulating their opinions bases on the ebb and flow of media commentary and polls! Politicians aren’t really listening to ‘their gut instinct’ is they go backwards and forwards on their principles based on media, small interest and polling rhetoric!

But why mention this?

Because its exhausting! Depending which way you lean, there is plenty of evidence to support your point of view! At the Dappled Planet, we would rather see a balanced approach to resolving our planet’s resource problems. Focusing exclusively on man-made CO2 emissions and how to moneytize them does not resolve the problem. Quite frankly, with the targets being bandied around, it is pretty clear that the only people who will benefit from carbon-taxes etc are the politicians and companies… because the reductions proposed do NOT drastically reduce 150 years of anthropogenic accumulation of CO2 by the end of this century - or even come close.

Sadly, the most drastic thing to do is start enforcing global popoulation control - imagine how wildly popular that would be?! And even that would not significantly impact upon the planet for this century - but we would defintely start to see a much healthier and sustainable environment going forward (Oh yes… Thats right, the economists of today believe the markets will grow for ever and for that to happen, the population has to keep growing…).

In the short to medum term, it would probably be far far more productive to focus on mankind adapting to the climate change than believing you can buy a house in the Florida Keys and not have to worry about the sea levels rising in your life time (or more likely, having the house wiped out by a hurricane…). Before today’s modern civilization, people migrated when climate extremes (which did happen and we have not experienced any of them in the last 100 years) forced them to leave their grounds. Today too many people are imprisoned in concrete towers in geographic locations currently not very well adapted to climate change.

And while the debate about man-made global warming rages on, raping and pillaging of the environment by corporations striving to cash in on the insatiable demands of humanity continues silently.

Its a viscious circle and a very tangled web of cause and consequence. Focusing on one issue - CO2 - does not resolve the appalling management of this planet by mankind. Nor do endless debates in the media. The world needs a holistic and global approach to managing environmental and climate change - and that is one debate that is not even being contemplated in they hysteria surrounding the management (or mismanagement) of a gas which makes up 0.04% of our atmosphere* and of which we only contribute about 5% annualy to and Mother Nature taking up the remaining 95% of CO2 production every year….

But at the end of the day, there is one thing we at The Dappled Planet are certain of: we will not be using fossil fuels to the same extent or manner in whch they are being used today simply because we are running out. Is anyone factoring that into their equations of every escalating man-made CO2 emissions? The oil spike (brought about by financial market speculation not supply shortages) in the middle of 2008 is but a sign of things to come. Efforts to find alternatives for transportation which do no rely on the current petroleum or the newer biological derivatives are essential - and we need to be finding them NOW! Taxing people is not necessarily the best way to promote that (unless those taxes go into funding alternatives which governments have been very shy of doing so far!)

*We at The Dappled Planet do acknowledge that despite the small concentrations of ALL greenhouse gases in our atmospehre, without these gases, the planet would be an estimated 20-30C cooler - or frozen.

December 20th, 2008 | Tags: change, climate, debate, emissions, environment, global, hysteria, media, population, scientists, warming | Category: global warming, population | Leave a comment

A tiny white possum found high up in the tropical Daintree forest in Australia hasn’t been spotted in 3 years.

“Probably extinct due to man made global warming…” expounds Professor Stephen Williams of James Cook Unversity in Queensland according to a recent news item on ABC Online.

The article then went onto mention tempertures in the rain forest (and indeed, globally) have risen by 0.5C (but the period of concern in which the temperatures had risen were not mentioned).

Here at the Dappled Planet, we are concerned about the ongoing extinction rates of megafauna on the planet but on the issue of which is killing off the animals faster - man induced global warming or man induced competition at the ground level (habitat destruction, hunting etc), we do tend to err on the side of man induced ground level competition.

And surely, a possum living in an already hot area with average temperatures probably in the 30C range, which has probably been on this planet for well over 60,000 years (when it is postulated man first landed on Australia during the last ice age), which has survived the dramatic (in excess of 5C) rise in temperatures associated with the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago is unlikely to suddenly perish just because the temperature may have crept up half a degree over the last 150 years?

Meterologist William Kininmonth, former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation certainly seemed to think blaming the extinction on a slight increase in temperature was a bit unlikely - and hence earned himself the moniker of “Climate Change skeptic.’ As he dryly points out, the climate of the Daintree has not varied significantly in the last 100 years…

At the Dappled Planet, if it could be proven that this marsupial was extinct (which was also not known - it just hadn’t been seen in 3 years)  exclusively due to climate change, then we’d be supportive of intiatives to try and prevent that.

But, if a possum can survive an ice age meltdown, and can survive hidden amongst the forest for 10s of 1000s of years and ONLY become a (possibly) extinct species AFTER man penetrates and starts destroying and/or changing its habitat - the Daintree Forest, is not at all conceivable that man induced habitat change is more likely killing off the possum than a small change in temperature which barely reflects the temperature change between winter and summer in the jungle?

We point this out because it is wrong to keep arguing man-made global warming is causing these animals to become extinct. In some (rare)  instances, that may be the case, but more commonly, it appears that man is causing this animals to become exctinct due to habitat desctruction/change or hunting. if that is the case, then these factors should be shouted from the roof tops - because those are things which we absolutely do have control over and immediate, fast-acting measures can (very successfully) be taken to prevent further degradation of the environment that these animals live in.

But to point out that animal species are dieing out because of man-induced global warming?? That doesn’t help preserve the species! That blames something which has taken 150 years to manifest as a potential problem, seems to give most people the right to procrastinate by debating whether or not global warming caused it or not, and then do nothing.

Sure… We could cut out CO2 emissions but lets be real here - all the targets being proposed by the governments around the world aren’t going to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere significantly - and certainly none are forecasting they will reduce the global temperature by more than 0.1C by the end of the century - end of the century!!! But if habitat destruction or change is really the cause of the demise of this possum then we can’t afford to wait a century or two to go “yep, yep… guess it wasn’t global warming that was causing the possum to die off. Might have been the eco-toursim scaring the critters deeper into the forest and downslopes to warmer climes…” or something similar.

So lets call a spade a spade here - if the possum is indeed suddenly and dramatically becoming extinct, it is far more likely to be doing it as a result of man modifying its land-based environment than fiddling with the global thermostat -and if thas the case, lets find out what that cause is and take immediate, preventative measures that will preserve the habitat of the possum. Not blame it on something which will take decades to rectify!

December 4th, 2008 | Tags: change, climate, destruction, extinct, forest, global, habitat, human, man, possum, white | Category: Animals, Disasterous Solutions, global warming | Leave a comment