Global warming can’t fool the roses
Every year the first Tuesday of November marks the race that stops the nation and rain, hail or shine, wet year or dry year, it also marks the bloom of the six standard roses that have bloomed on that day every year for the past 25 years in our garden at Numurkah.
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If Earth, which is spinning at 1600 km/h, was truly warming up at the alarming rate the ABC and others profess, those six standard roses would be blooming earlier every year. They are not!
Superimposed on the daily solar cycle is the monthly lunar cycle driven by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. These two cycles interact to produce variations in atmospheric pressure, tides and currents in the oceans and atmosphere.
These are short-term weather markers. The yearly seasonal cycle is caused as the tilted axis of Earth’s rotation affects the intensity of solar energy received by each hemisphere. This produces spring, summer, autumn and winter for every spot on the planet.
As the Earth’s orbit cycles are elliptical, seasonal extreme temperatures also vary. When the Earth’s orbit is at its most elliptic, about 23 per cent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our planet’s closest approach to the sun each year than does at its farthest departure from the sun.
Sunspots are indicators of solar activity which cause periods of global warming and cooling. The 22-year sunspot cycle, which correlates with cycles of floods and droughts, is two 11-year periods when the sun’s hemispheres switch magnetic fields and reverse polarity.
We live in the Holocene Epoch, the latest warm phase of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The climate history of the Holocene, and its predecessor the Eemian, are well documented in ice core logs and other geological records.
One cycle consists of a glacial age of about 80,000 years, followed by a warmer age of about 20,000 years with peak warming occurring about 12,000 years ago.
Our modern warming era commenced 12,000 years ago. There have been eight warm eras separated by long glacial winters over the past 800,000 years, where vast ice sheets melt, sea levels rise dramatically, coral reefs and coastal settlements are inundated.
Jeffery Davy
Numurkah
Carbon projects are a win-win for everyone
(After Glasgow climate talks and as) the pre-election noise increases, you could forgive Australians for not realising that there is already a great deal of solid and consistent work happening to reduce emissions, especially driven by the agriculture sector.
Agriculture is a uniquely critical part of the solution because it can both reduce emissions and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, while most other industries can only work to minimise their footprint.
Projects in the land sector over the past decade have delivered millions of tonnes of abatement, all while enhancing on-farm productivity.
Conservative estimates place the reinvestment into agriculture from carbon farming at around half a billion dollars. That’s money flowing back into farms around the country, allowing investment into infrastructure and technology, and sustaining businesses and jobs through periods of drought.
This investment will only grow given Australian carbon credits are in high demand thanks to our robust system that's regulated and independently verified.
The same can’t be said for every aspect of the economy.
Many of Australia’s key industries face a bumpy road on the path to net zero. There will be radical changes to their operations, and the path forward for some of them isn’t currently clear.
But farmers are in an enviable position. All they have to do is put the environment on their balance sheet and the country’s net zero goals will be closer within reach.
James Schultz
Co-founder and chief executive officer
GreenCollar
Flexible approach needed
It has been interesting to watch the response from Australia’s federal and state governments to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular the constant changes to their so-called ‘roadmaps’.
This week’s reports tell us the modelling around infection number forecasts was on the pessimistic side, and as a consequence the number of people catching COVID-19 and requiring either treatment or hospitalisation has been less than predicted.
As a consequence we have seen numerous alterations to ‘roadmaps’ (apart from Western Australia).
This is sensible politics. All scientific modelling is just that — it is modelling, a prediction that is not exact.
So why don’t governments adopt this same approach to other scientific modelling and their responses as the need for a flexible approach becomes apparent?
Take the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, for example.
Modelling for this plan has been proven to be inaccurate, whether it’s the adverse impact of increasing flows or the job losses from reduced economic activity in regions where productive water has been significantly reduced.
Report after report has told governments that they need to change aspects of the basin plan. In other words, make it more flexible and adaptive, which is what they promised in the first place.
But unlike their approach to the pandemic, this essential flexibility continues to go missing.
It’s easier for governments to adopt the line that the basin plan must be completed ‘in full and on time’, despite the environmental and economic damage it is causing and the $13 billion hit to taxpayers.
As a bonus for governments there is no political risk, especially for the Coalition. It panders to those from whom it needs support in marginal city and South Australian seats, and has little risk of losing ‘blue ribbon’ seats in the regional areas that are being adversely affected.
Meanwhile, we are stuck with a failing basin plan that is likely to go down in history as one of our nation’s greatest policy disasters.
Laurie Beer
Mayrung, NSW
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