Coal dependence dooms us all
MP Barnaby Joyce wants to amend government legislation about the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in new fossil fuel projects. [ABC Online, 16 February]
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What part of "clean energy" does Joyce *not* understand?! Joyce also warned Labor parliamentarians in coal-based electorates that they could lose their seats unless they support his changes. Coal is a finite resource; greenhouse pollution is acknowledged by this government as an issue to be addressed. When will Joyce and his ilk recognise that dependence on coal-and-mostly-coal dooms the future of those electorates to dead-end economies? Perhaps it is Joyce himself who - finally! - deserves to face the wrath of his voters!
Judy Bamberger, O'Connor ACT
Elephants impede water security?
A full, honest and fruitful discussion of our current and future water supplies, or our water security, in the face of Climate Change, is impeded by two elephants and many asses.
Should we have more dams, rain water harvesting with underground storage to cut evaporation, solar-powered desalination plants, more water recycling, northern flood-rains re-routed southwards, or all of the above, as water is slowly becoming like the gold of old.
The first elephant is the unfortunate fact that climate scientists have chosen a wrong theory as to the main or primary cause of climate ruin. At the end of WWII, global annual average temperatures and the level of CO2 in the atmosphere both began rising. The greenhouse effect or theory of a carbon dioxide blanket around the Earth, causing warming, now described as radiative forcing by greenhouse gases, holds that rising CO2 levels caused the rising temperatures or warming.
It is more likely that both rises are co-symptoms of other things happening, and the scientists have conflated correlation with causation. This may never be admitted, but a main thing is we cease burning fossil fuels, though the whole fixation with 'carbon emissions' is leading to greenwash-hogwash like 'soil carbon'.
Elephant 2 is the real primary or main cause of climate ruin, and other causes, about eight or ten in all. On 26 January 1788 let's say, we white people began the great deforestation of Australia project. In 60,000 years Indigenous Aussies have not cut down a single tree.
Covering eastern NSW and QLD we had ancient Amazon-like rainforests, great forests of giant trees. Where I live now in Lorn-Maitland, the rainforest covered the entire Hunter Valley Floodplain. Eighty-foot (27m) red cedars, giant fig trees with huge buttress roots, sassafras and turpentine, all plundered for timber and eventually completely cleared and burnt off, leaving cow and crop paddocks.
Same with the magnificent rainforests of the Macleay, and Manning, and the rest. Inland we cleared 15 billion trees to make the Murray-Darling Basin irrigation area. Worldwide, since civilisation and agriculture began, we have been removing the planet's great forests for 10,000 or so years. Remnant patches of forest are mostly 60-year regrowth, limited to ground too steep to farm.Turns out trees and forests are nature's evaporative air-cooling, air-humidifying, and rain-cloud-making installations. No forests, no cooling of our continent and no rain, except that which might blow in from evaporation over the oceans.
A second main cause of GW/CC if the vast amount of heated gases exhausted into our summer air by burning fossil fuels, from about 1.5Bn cars, truck, planes, trains and ships, and from the stacks of coal-fired power stations. About 20 per cent of these heated gases is hot carbon dioxide. Causes of warming 3-10? The crunch. To cool our overheating planet we need to replant 1-3 trillion trees. In Australia, we need to replant forests inland, perhaps 50 billion trees, if we are ever to have more or less reliable rain again.
To obtain water we could just build say 10,000 solar-powered desalination plants, but forests cool or continent and we dislike living at temperatures of 40 degrees celcius and more. Currently, a La Nina weather system from the oceans is saving us from more of that recent horror, lethal dryness.
Forget using silly words as weapons, like 'woke' and 'virtue-signalling'. Wake up Australia and show some real virtues like truth and courage and intelligent and informed planning, or soon enough we'll all be climate refugees.
Les Hutchinson, Lorn
Water
Enjoy using your sprinklers for two hours each evening even after it has rained all day - it is not going to last.
Chaffey Dam has only been kept high enough to trigger Level 1 water restrictions as it is not currently being used. Our water is coming from Dungowan Dam and river flows a situation that can only happen as Tamworth Regional Council owns Dungowan. This may not be the case if a new dam is built. The level currently in Dungowan has not been available for nearly a month on the TRC website
Water will become much more expensive in the future whatever source it comes from. A waterwise garden is smart - new lawns are not!
Lyn Allen, Tamworth