junk journalism

it may seem trivial, but the press should have some sort of responsibility. For instance I was reading this article which asserts that the Government in Australia has undertaken big spending and had poor results. I'm tempted to accept that argument as it stands, but then the author (Stephen Kirchner) starts down a seemingly unrelated topic and discusses a speech by the Secretary of the Treasury who makes a statement and quotes Ken Henry:

But he went on to suggest this expansion "has never been reversed and I think I can safely say that it never will be"

Not so fast Ken!.

So it seems that he wants to disagree with this and sets up an elaborate argument. But you know he doesn't once say why he thinks it is unlikely that the expansion of Government will be reversed.

So either Stephen gets carried away with his discussion on spending issues and looses the point, or the Editor has chopped it. So the Jury is out for me ... is he

• a dickhead just setting up a strawman argument to make his personal points
• a victim of editorial interference
• or incompetent

dunno, but either way it is just another example of the poor journalism that the Australian seems to be filled with these days.

Like this one, where the headline appeals the the ordinary persons fear that by defending themselves a criminal will go unpunished and they will be punished. But when you read past the headlines you find a different case which is clearly no longer defence and perhaps not even burglary either.

What happened was truly horrific, and my heart goes out to the victims, but the significant departure from the ordinary (and the headline grabber) is:

What followed was described in Reading Crown Court as self-defence that went too far.

[the victim] ... escaped after throwing a coffee table and getting his brother Tokeer, 35, to help chase offenders down the street, bringing one of them to the ground.

Walid Salem, one of the intruders, suffered a permanent brain injury after he was struck with a cricket bat so hard that it broke into three pieces.

Neighbours saw several men beating Salem with weapons, including a metal pole.

I just shake my head that the Australian tries to contort this into something else and then goes on to leave so many very disturbing issues alone and unanswered.

poor journalism

the dogma of Infinite Growth

or in reality ...

limits to growth

Something which is central to the climate change argument but is conveniently ignored (probably because its in the way too hard basket out in the back yard) is the limits to growth.

Thomas Malthus wrote an essay on the topic of population back in 1798, later another organisation (called the Club of Rome) put together a similar idea in 1972 which was called The Limits to Growth.

The concept of limits to growth is intuitive to anyone who has any common sense (typically those who have ever worked with things in the natural world, not just big city fantasy land).

Even for big city dwellers (who think food comes from the supermarket, milk from bottles and water from the tap) if you put a plant into a pot it will eventually become "root bound" as its root system fills all the available space in the pot. You can keep pouring in more nutrients and energy, but the plant will eventually stop being able to grow.

However Thomas Malthus's view on this has widely been rejected. Evidence against it has come from the amazing population (I can only call it) explosion that has happened since the industrial revolution.

Curiously I think that its the same people who are saying "Climate change is not caused by people" who are also saying "there are no limits to growth".

In an ideal theoretical world I'm sure its true ... there may be no limits to growth, but there must be changes to accommodate for this.

So with that in mind, lets look at something else ... by now I think most people are aware of this graph:




I'm sure its about the most contentious bit of data representation there is right now. Like is the data cooked, is the data false ... blah blah.

Science is about being able to reproduce things and ensuring validity. So if something is true then is should be validatable and repeatable. Further it should also match with other ways of looking at things. Well let me introduce another hockey stick ... but this time the data is quite a bit more certain.



Uncanny isn't it ... how closely this resembles the CO2 outputs. So, if you are looking for any supporting evidence on rise in CO2 and human involvement well perhaps these two support each other quite a bit ... it would seem pretty expectable that if the human population has gone up over the same period at the same rate that the other graph of CO2 is just about bang on.

So where is the surprise that everyone is trying to deny?

To me its looking rather like Thomas may have been on to something back then...

population changes and (mis?) management

I was reading this morning in the Australian says that our population is "growing the fastest since the 1960s and double the global average. Net immigration accounted for two-thirds of this people boom".

It went on to put a number on that, we had 511,000 new arrivals last financial year.

Give or take, that's a population the size of the Gold Coast just sprouting up.

What the hell

There is the viewpoint that we need to grow our population in Australia. Well this is the growth in the population of 3 major cities since between 1911 and 2001.


These three cities account for nearly half the Australian population.

To explain the graph a little I put Brisbane on a different scale to the others because unlike Sydney or Melbourne (which over the period have increased in population by around six times) Brisbane has had its population grow by nearly twelve times since 1911 (From 139,480 to 1,650,422)

This represents a startling management challenge, which I think anyone who lives in these cities may feel has not been entirely well performed.

Also, anyone who lived in any of these cities has seen amazing changes in how life is in those cities every 10 years.

When I moved to Brisbane in 1983 it was a nice sprawling country town. There was not insane traffic and you could get out into the countryside quite easily.

At that time the population was 1,028,527 ... but when I left in 2001 it had swollen to 1,619,280 and you could really notice the difference. Traffic was worse, public attitude was more strained and road rage and other less than ideal social problem was on the rise ... so lifestyle was certainly not better.

I imagine Sydney has undergone similar changes (although perhaps not as straining as Brisbane).

But I wonder if this is in our interests in Australia ... I mean really.

Firstly Australia has a really poor record of environmental management, and I'm not just talking about how we manage our natural heritage (which should be a national shame), I am talking about how we've been managing our agriculture and forestry practices. Look at the Murray Darling crisis for just a start.

Our politicians espouse protecting our lifestyle, but seem to be busily facilitating its erosion.

I grew up on the Gold Coast, it was a nice place back then ... quite but pretty. Its been turned into a massive tourist point and people are relocating there at a rate which defies understanding. This has resulted in the destruction of vast areas of mangroves and other critical habitat for allowing everyone to have a "water front" villa.

Don't just take my word for this ... Google (bless its little heart) has given us the tools to go check out these sorts of things without having to invest huge amounts of money and time ... have a look below


View Larger Map

If you like fishing, you can kiss good by to this area as the great fishing spot it once was ... mangroves are going and so too are the breeding grounds for fish. Not to mention the increased pressure on fishing created by the increasing population. As boat traffic is manic (along with the jetSki's I can't even enjoy sailing there anymore.

The urban sprawl is encroaching inland too, and what were previously lovely areas (habitat for wildlife) are being cleared to become just another urban wasteland.

Its like this all up and down the coast, from Coffs Harbour to Rainbow beach. Matter of fact its pretty built up between Coffs and Sydney ... and I'm willing to bet its not empty between Sydney and Melbourne?

Used to be that my family and I could live in a place where we could go fishing and enjoy walks along the shore



and we could find wildlife not far from our homes ...





Its fast disappearing ... So what are we doing to ourselves and for what benefit?

Work colleagues who owned land in the "hinterland" have sold up to developers to turn it all to urban corridor all the way between Brisbane and Southport. Much of this change can be attributed to the growth in population ... but is it good?


Lucky for us others are seeming to ask the same questions.

twisted researcher (tortures data till it confesses)

A friend of mine posted me information about something quite bizarre yesterday.

The ecological footprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year.

my first reaction: Ha ha ha ha ha haaaa haa ha hha

It reminds me of another stupid one I saw some months ago about Google contributing to global warming. Clearly this circus is attracting academics who are getting paid by saying anything as long as they flabber on about Global Warming.

I have not got my hands on th book or research yet, but from reading this site it seems that their methodology of analysis is something like:

they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.

They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.

They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.

Well, assuming fido eats chicken, not beef or some other meat ... the old scale of falsehood of "lies, bloody lies and statistics" comes immediately to mind.

They make some very interesting twists of the tail here. I will need to examine their methodology but by choosing to calculate the energy of the vehicle and claiming then that the land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, exactly where this would be and how is interesting.

I don't see any mention of the amount of land required to absorb the pollution (mining isn't clean you know) nor do I see any amount of land involved in that.

They seem to have taken quite a distorted view of ecological footprinting (as described by the authors who created the concept Wackernagel, M., & Rees, W. (1995). Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth.: New Society Publishers.)

You can read another summary of their book on New Scientist, but it is not in any academic style, more like a "womens weekly" sort of article. To be fair they make some interesting points on bringing perspective to the issues of this.

I'll look this up and post back when I have done the analysis, meantime here is a critique which is brief but well done that suggests they are out by about 10 times (under estimating the car - over estimating the dog).

So it takes 613 gallons of ethanol to drive the Land Cruiser 10,000 kilometers. That translates into 0.61 hectares of corn land.
...
and
... 0.062 hectares worth of land to feed an overfed dog.

its a worthwhile read if you want to.

So, when does debate become just a meaningless diatribe of confused blither? (about 20 years ago by my reckoning after the JASON group produced findings of global warming which the US Govt sought to ignore for self interest purposes)