ITS ALMOST TIME TO SWITCH OUT THE LIGHTS !

[duane]

NOTES FOR OPENING KEYNOTE
AUSTRALIAN WATER SUMMIT, 1 APRIL 2009
MAUDE BARLOW, SENIOR ADVISOR ON
WATER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY

It is a great honour and pleasure to address you today. This is my fifth visit to your wonderful country, with which I feel an enormous affinity. I wish I were here under happier circumstances than to discuss the urgent water crisis facing Australia and so many other parts of the world, but alas, it is this crisis that brings us together on this fine morning.
THE GLOBAL WATER CRISIS
Here are just a few headlines from the last month alone that give a flavour of what we are dealing with:
• Argentina is experiencing the worst drought in half a century, pushing th
country to a state of emergency
• California facing worst drought in modern history.
• Nevada has been declared a natural disaster area because of severe
drought
• Jordan facing historic drought
• Kenya has declared a national drought emergency
• In Spain, water is the new battleground as swaths of Southwest Spain are steadily turning into desert
• Pakistan is on the brink of “water disaster” due to accelerated melting of
the glaciers and massive depletion in the Indus Basin Rivers
• South Asia’s growing water stress threatens river basins that sustain half
the region’s 1.5 billion people
• China is facing the worst drought in 50 years, leaving 4 and a half million
Chinese without drinking water and destroying half this year’s wheat crop.
• Israel faces worst water crisis in 80 years
• Water crisis hits Iraq
• The world is on the edge of “water bankruptcy” recently conceded the
World Economic Forum.
Suddenly it is so clear: the world is running out of clean water. This information contradicts what we all learned in school, which was that there is an infinite hydrologic cycle and we cannot run out of water, no matter how much we use or waste. But what our teachers did not know and could not teach us was that in a few short decades, humans would create a freshwater demand that far outstrips the earth’s supply.
How is this possible?
• We are polluting massive amounts of surface and even ground water,
rendering it inaccessible to us.
• As a result we are over extracting our rivers to death, mostly for flood
irrigation and to grow crops in deserts, creating more desert.
• We move water from where it supports a healthy hydrologic cycle and ship
it away from watersheds embedded in commodity exports.
• We mine groundwater far faster than nature can replace it and ship it to
mega-cities, which dump it into the ocean instead of returning it to the
watershed.
• We pave over water-retentive landscape, negatively affecting the
hydrologic cycle and reducing rainfall on land.
By these actions, humans are emptying aquifers and watersheds, perhaps
permanently. This means that whole areas of the world may be drying out, not experiencing what many incorrectly describe as “cyclical drought.” One scientist calls them “hot stains;” they include Northern China, most of India and Pakistan, the Middle East, twenty-two countries in Africa (where every one of the 677 major
lakes is imperilled), Southern Europe, Mexico City, which is sinking, and the American Southwest, where the Colorado River is in “catastrophic decline” and Lake Mead, the man-made backup reservoir that would “never” run out of water has only a twelve year supply left.

We are just beginning to understand the devastation of this drying to the
ecosystem and other species as we humans continue to rob the earth of the water it needs for survival. The human water footprint surpasses all others and endangers life on earth itself.
Close to two billion people now live in water-stressed parts of the planet and almost three billion have no running water within a kilometre of their homes. The global population tripled in the twentieth century, but water consumption jumped sevenfold. By 2025, unless we dramatically change our ways, two thirds of the population will face water scarcity and by 2050, we will need an 80 % increase in water supplies just to feed ourselves. No one knows where this water is going to come from.
The global water crisis is taking a terrible toll on the world’s most vulnerable people. Contaminated water is implicated in 85% of all sickness and disease in the Third World. In the last decade, the number of city dwellers without access to clean water increased by more than sixty million. By 2030, more than half the population of these huge urban centres will be slum dwellers with no access to clean water or sanitation whatever. In Mumbai India, there is an example of a toilet that serves 5,440 people.
More children die of water-borne disease than war, HIV/AIDS and traffic
accidents together. In the last decade, the number of children who died of
diarrhea exceeded the number of people killed in all the armed conflicts since the Second World War. Every eight seconds a child dies from dirty water.
Tragically the world community has been inexplicably slow in confronting this crisis and has only introduced stopgap measures at best. And most countries have yet to properly confront their own water crisis in a systematic way in order to prepare their citizens for the changes to come.
Let me say here today: we will have to deal with this crisis by design or default.
We will either see it coming and plan accordingly or we will be forced to deal with it once it has hit us and then our actions will just be reactionary.

THE AUSTRALIA WATER CRISIS
Australia has a water crisis. In fact I would count Australia among the “hot stains” I referred to earlier, a nation destroying its water heritage in order to remain an economic powerhouse and lulled by successive political leaders into thinking that this is just a temporary drought and that technology will save the day.
Now lest you think I come from “away” to tell you how to run your business, let me tell you that my country Canada is probably a worse water manager than yours. We haven’t updated our national water laws in 40 years and we are one of the biggest water guzzlers in the world, second only to the United States. The only real difference between our two countries is that we have more water to be cavalier about.
What has gone wrong here in Australia?
Clearly Australia, like the rest of the world, is suffering the effects of global warming and greenhouse-gas induced climate change which in turn melts glaciers, causes excessive evaporation of waterways and creates deserts. But this is not the whole story as some politicians assert.

Damaged Waterways
First, there has been great destruction of existing water systems, Rivers are being drained at an unsustainable rate; aquifers are way over-pumped – groundwater extraction skyrocketed a whopping 90 per cent in the 1990s – as well as being contaminated from the 80,000 dumpsites under the major cities; and many surface management areas now exceed sustainable limits. Less than 8 per cent of Australia’s old growth forests remain and 90 per cent of the Murray-Darling wetlands have been lost.
The Murray Darling is vastly over-extracted, much of it for corporate-based agribusiness that plunders the rivers to send huge volumes of water around the world in the form of “virtual water exports.” I note however that UNESCO’s Hydrology Institute recently reported that the amount of water shipped out of the country in commodities was cut in half in the last two years – most likely due tothe devastating collapse of the rice industry here. This is a perfect example of default thinking – waiting until the crisis hits instead of heeding the warnings from
scientists and acting to avert it.
Poor food producing practices, such as flood irrigation, have been tolerated and the Managed Investment Scheme plantations give preference, as Dr. Ian Douglas of Fair Water Use Australia says, to “monoculture moonscapes” out to extract as much profit as they can from the waters of the Murray Darling at the expense of the smaller, more sustainably minded farming operations.
Further, Australia has partially weathered the global economic downturn by dependence on resource exploitation, all of which places huge burdens on already stressed water supplies. In New South Wales alone, at least sixteen river systems have been permanently damaged from careless mining practices.
Rivers SOS says: “The devastation caused by long-wall and open cut mining operations is as horrifying as it is widespread. The destruction of aquifers and heavy metal pollution of ground and surface water is nationwide and a disgrace.”
But governments continue to allow this exploitation of resources; over $64 billion of new mining operations in Australia have recently been announced. Similarly, unregulated, rampant, excessive urban development is not only allowed but also encouraged by many governments.
In a word, successive governments at all levels in Australia have bought the ideology of economic globalization and unlimited growth, an ideology, as an American environmentalist said, that has the same DNA as the cancer cell and must turn on its host in order to survive.

Privatization
Secondly, governments at all levels have bought into the notion that water is a commodity, best allocated by the market, and now increasingly in the hands of largely unregulated private water brokers. This development dates back to the 1994 decision to establish an open water market in Australia, basically gifting massive amounts of water to irrigators who did not pay for this public investment
in the first place, and giving them pre-emptive rights to this once public water.
Let’s not mince words: this is the privatization of the Murray Darling River where private owners and brokers, who oversee annual transactions of $1.68 billion, have more say over these depleted water supplies than governments.
The whole plan lacks focus toward an end goal with no distinction between water sold to supply overseas markets and water sold for domestic purposes and holds no guarantee of water for where it is most needed – in the lakes, rivers and aquifers desperate for survival. In fact the first national report on water markets (2007-2008) clearly states that water purchased for the environment made up only 8 per cent of the total water traded last year. While trading is still supposed to be limited to rural communities, it is only a matter of time before it is going to
be opened up both to cities and to private foreign investors anxious to find new sources of water in countries that still permit the foreign sale of this precious commodity. And who is to stop large water owners from deciding that their water is worth more on the open market than being used to grow food – the reason they were given these free allocations in the first place?

Water trading is not the only form of water privatization in Australia. A thriving bottled water industry is extracting pristine water - about 600 million litres a year- from water stressed aquifers and paying pittance for the water. Big foreign private water utilities fund staff and research at the so-called “Centres of Excellence in Water Management” at Australian universities. Foreign-based water interests now supply water services to one capital city and in several county centres. As well, many state government-owned water utilities have now been corporatized and are seen as cash cows, sources of funding rather than a vehicle for public service. In Melbourne, conservation-minded consumers were
recently rewarded for their trouble by being told their water rates were going to rise 97 per cent because they were not consuming enough water.
Little wonder some are calling for the complete privatization of water services when so-called public corporations behave in that way.
If Australians want to see where this trend will lead you, look no further than Chile, where all water is a private commodity and local farmers have been put off the land by big agribusiness and mining interests and where, in one huge region in the South, a single electricity company from Spain has bought up 80 percent of the water rights. Towns caught in the struggle have been left bone dry.

Dams, Desalination and Diversion
Another form of corporate control of water in Australia is the growing high tech water industry, a result of almost cult-like faith of governments here that technology will have the answer. I call them the three “D”s - dams, desalination and diversion. Like many countries, Australia has built too many large dams creating high evaporation losses and high levels of mercury and blue-green algae contamination in the water captured behind the dams. The advantage of storing water in aquifers is that both these problems are offset. Big dams are being de-commissioned for environmental reasons all over the world and Australians must demand an end to blind faith in them here.
Australian governments of all stripes are also busy building expensive, energy guzzling desalination plants, that will further pollute the fishing grounds and coral reefs of Australia’s coastlines. Desalination plants generate a poisonous byproduct, a lethal combination of concentrated salt brine, the chemicals needed for the reverse osmosis process, and the aquatic life sucked into the process. Dr. Ian Dyson, a marine sedimentologist, says that the discharge from Adelaide’s
plant will create huge hyper saline sea lakes, aquatic dead zones that will have catastrophic impacts on the fisheries. Building big desalination plants, weirs and pipelines such as the Victoria government’s North-South pipeline, (being done without an environmental assessment) also gives control over Australia’s water to foreign water corporations. It is ironic that the two big French companies bidding on the Wonthaggi plant – Suez and Veolia – are about to lose their Paris water licenses when they come up for renewal in a few months.

No Vision

Finally, I would argue that there is no vision and no overall plan to save
Australia’s water heritage other than a vague belief in the magic of markets andkneeling at the throne of big technology. The only sectors being asked to make a sacrifice are homeowners, who really make up a very small share of the water problem, and small farmers who cannot compete with their larger competitors.
The steady slide to a market system of water allocation will have dire
consequences: the rich will have preferable access; there will be no incentive to protect source water as it is not profitable to do so; and nature will have to fend for itself. There is an urgent need for the governments of Australia to declare a national water emergency and come together to create comprehensive, lasting and sustainable plan for Australia’s water future, one based on five pillars.

THE WAY FORWARD
Public Trust
First, Australia must declare its water to be a public trust. It is time for the
national government to re-instate the public ownership of water. As Acacia Rose of Alpine Riverkeepers explains, “Governments simply do not have the power or right to afford water ownership rights to corporations or private interests, or tradable rights without a mandate from the Australian people who are the rightful owners along with the environment, of Australia’s water resources.” It must be clarified in law that no one owns Australia’s surface and groundwater supplies;
rather, they belongs to all Australians, the ecosystem and the future and must be preserved for all time in law and practice as a public good. This means that the national government must re-appropriate all water now in private hands for fair allocation and with fair compensation.
As well, privately owned municipal water service providers should be replaced by not-for-profit public systems delivering clean safe water as a public service.
This is not to say that there is no role for the private sector in helping to create a water secure future. There is a very important role for the private sector in finding ways to reduce its own water footprint and for helping to create appropriate technology for restoring sick bodies of water. But corporations should not determine the allocation of water; that is the role of government.

Watershed Restoration
Second is the crucial need to revitalize wounded water systems and return and protect enough water in rivers, aquifers and watersheds for their survival and the survival of other life in this country. Your scientists have been telling you about the need for a comprehensive assessment of water takings for years. Some have sensibly called for a comprehensive national assessment of those aquatic ecosystems most at risk, while others favour “water accounts” and “entitlement records” to monitor the available water and set a benchmark for how much must
be set aside for sustainable groundwater and river system health. Quite simply, the rivers, streams and aquifers should be guaranteed the water as a top priority.
That will require a dramatic reduction in extractions from the Murray Darling and other stressed systems.
The need to establish comprehensive, systemic freshwater protected areas is urgent and must be accompanied by effective land and water management that places first priority on the environmental health of these systems. Rivers have rights and needs to natural flows. All water catchments must be enlarged and the destruction of high-conservation value forests and the logging of native forests to make way for plantations must stop. Soil, vegetation, riparian zones, wetlands,
and estuaries must be restored and protected. The mining industry must be forced to comply with strict environmental standards and a one-kilometre safety zone must be established around all rivers and lakes where mining activity is taking place. The precautionary principle of ecosystem protection must take precedence over commercial demands on these waters. Only by restoring the integrity of watersheds and rivers will the drying of Australia be reversed.

Conservation
Third, it is crucial to abandon the ”hard path” of large-scale technology such as the pipelines, big dams and big desalination plants, for the ‘soft path” of conservation. The hard path is centralized and capital and energy intensive, and very expensive because of the involvement of large corporate players. The conservation alternative favours rainwater harvesting; recycling; strict codes for new buildings and funding for retrofitting old ones; energy reduction and the development of alternative energy sources; investment in municipal infrastructure to cut down on loss of water through leaks; and the collection of grey water and
storm water which is captured and re-used, not dumped into the ocean. It is much less expensive and you don’t need to worry about the bank bailing in hard times.
The Salisbury storm water harvesting project uses wetlands to clean the water, which is then injected into the aquifer for storage. The water is then pumped for use by industry, gardens, parks and some household uses such as flushing toilets. Colin Pitman, director of city projects for Salisbury, reports that if Adelaide recycled 60 per cent of its storm water, more than 100 gigalitres of water could
be produced for $300 million, compared to the desalination plant, which will produce 50 gigalitres a year at the cost of $1.2 billion! Similarly a recently leaked document that was commissioned by the state government but ignored reportsthat both the controversial $750 million North South pipeline and the desalination plant are unnecessary and their water sources much more cheaply realized through conservation methods.
Conservation would also reward different and more appropriate food production practices as well as less water intensive crop production. It would require industrial compliance, with strict laws if necessary. Martin Luther King said “Legislation may not change the heart but it will restrain the heartless.”

Fair Allocation
Because there is not enough water for all current use, far less than all the new demands to be placed upon it in the coming years, access must be granted on a priority basis. After ecosystem health and protection is guaranteed, water for peoples’ daily use, and water for local, sustainable food production must be paramount. As environmentalist John Caldecott explains, “At a time when climate change needs to be taken into account, societies and economies need to be redesigned to ensure goods and services are produced and consumed with the least consumptive of resources by the supply chain. This means our food needs
to be produced as close as possible to the point of consumption and the needs of local markets must rank ahead of interstate and export markets.” Commercial use of water must be regulated and priced and permits for access must be subject to available water supplies.
That is not to say that water should be a free-for-all. Water supplies must be guarded and protected by law and access must conform to strict principles of conservation and equity. Nor is this to say that water should be free. Recovering the true cost of providing clean water should be done on a not-for-profit basis and tiered, so that no one denied is water for basic needs but its abuse is constrained by higher prices for higher use.

The Right to Water
Finally, it must be commonly understood that water is not first and foremost a commercial good, although of course it has an economic dimension, but rather, a human right. What is needed now is binding law, in every country and at the United Nations, to codify that states have the obligation to deliver sufficient, safe, accessible and affordable water to their citizens as a public service. Behind the call for a binding right to water covenant are questions of principle that must be decided soon as the world’s water sources become more depleted and fought
over.
Is access to water a human right or just a need? Is water a common good like air or a commodity like Coca Cola? Who is being given the right or the power to turn the tap on or off – the people, governments, or the invisible hand of the market?
Who sets the price for water in Adelaide or Perth - the locally elected water board or the CEO of a transnational corporation? The global water crisis cries out for good governance and good governance needs binding, legal bases that rest on universally applicable human rights. A United Nations covenant would set the framework for water as a social and cultural asset and would establish the indispensable legal groundwork for a just system of distribution. It would establish once and for all that it is not okay for one person to appropriate water for private profit while another lacks access because of inability to pay.
We are keen to see Australia join the growing list of nations supporting a right to water covenant at the UN and urgently ask the national government to declare its support for such a treaty.

CONCLUSION
I know I have posed some tough questions and solutions today and I know many in this room will not agree with me. But I ask you to answer the question: is your solution working? I say that the status quo is a recipe for disaster and what is needed now is bold thinking based on the set of principles above. There are wonderful voices all over Australia with brilliant and innovative ideas. The Victoria Women’s Trust’s Water Mark, founded by visionary Mary Crooks, is one such project. In the next few days, the Australian Water Network, coordinated by the tireless justice advocate Bernard Eddy, will be formally launched to bring the
voices of everyday Australians who are passionate about this issue to this
debate.
Eddy says that he and many other water advocates feel strongly that Australia isin denial about its very own “inconvenient truth.” This country is leading the world down the wrong path on water management, he says, but is the last place on earth that should be burdened with such a dubious honour.
This potentially fatal legacy for following generations is ironically the least
nationally discussed issue – hard to believe when there is daily evidence of the climate crisis here. Water must surely now be put at the epicentre of Australia’s concerns.

Hear the words of Thomas Friedman, hardly an extremist, in a recent New York Times column: “Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2009 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it is telling us that the whole growth model we created over the past 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that this is the year when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said ‘No more.’
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change… We can’t do this anymore. Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assts, scientists are warning us that we are living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets.”

American environmentalist Ernest Callenbach calls them the four laws of
ecology: “All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last.”

Thank you

[ColinJEly]

All very doom & gloom! But where are the statistics to back up the assertions? I am just reading 'The Sceptical Environmentalist' by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statastician. He is a member of greenpeace who thought that all the sceptics where wrong, until he checked out the statistics. The message in his book is that there are things that can be improved, but we haven't reached doomsday just yet. It reminds me of an experience I had just the other day. Went to a refurbished shopping centre in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. They have a food court with a glass wall overlooking the yarra valley into Melbourne. Went there to look at all the suburbs, and couldn't see them! All I could see was the green of trees! In streets! In backyards!

[duane]

Unfortunately, these backyards dont produce the food and fibre we all require.

What's happening out in 'farmsville' is complete devastation.

Just ask Ian James.

Dont take my word for it, for I too, am like you Col....its all green here in my oasis but that is hiding a far more serious undertone of the true reality.

[ColinJEly]

Duane
As Bjorn says in his book, there are problems out there, but we have to deal with them in order of priority. Don't have the book in front of me so you will forgive me if I try and quote from memory. Greenpiece, WWF and Worldwatch say that we are doomed because we are losing 25% of our species every year, but there own statistics tell us that the real figure is only 0.07% BLATANT LYING! All the money that well meaning 'Do-Gooders' have donated to 'Save the World' could have been better spent on a real problem like the MDBS! Think of the millions our government spends on 'weed control', what if it was reallocated to rehabilitating the soil instead. Prince Charles says in his books about 'Highgrove' that the same 'weeds' are seldom a problem two years running. If anyone can get their hands on The Sceptical Environmentalist' by Bjorn Lomborg I thoroughly recommend it. It is a bit heavy going with all the statistics, but if you just accept his word and read the text it is good. Very good chapter on 'worldwide food shortages - OR NOT'

[ColinJEly]

BTW his opinion is that there is some Anthropogenic Global Warming but that is not the sole cause, there are natural causes as well which we can not do anything about. Instead of flying all our flunkies, and our flunkies flunkies around the world to places like Kyoto, Bali and Copenhagen, we would be better investing on ways for our primary producers to adjust to the changing climate by switching crops

[duane]

All of that is spot on Col.... especially the bit about $$ being

better spent on a real problem like the MDBS

There is no fudging of statistics there.

[sceptic]

Lomborg (and his supporters) likes to make much of his supposed involvement with Greenpeace and that involvement somehow makes him an environmentalist and his supposed conversion noteworthy. It's a pity he didn't tell Greenpeace, they hadn't heard of him and when asked about this on the ABC's Earthbeat programon 13th October 2001 replied:

Alexandra de Blas: So Bjorn Lomborg, you say you’ve been a paid-up member of Greenpeace?

Bjorn Lomborg: I’ve been a member, I’ve never been out in a rubber boat, I’m a suburban kind of Greenpeace member, your stereotypical person who contributes and nothing else.

So he was a financial member at some stage and nothing else, hardly qualifies as an "environmentalist". So looking at his websiteto see whether he's published any peer reviewed articles on the environment or climate, the only peer reviewed articles listed are:

Adaptive Parties in a Multiparty, Multidimensional System with Imperfect Information
26.07.2001

Nucleus and Shield: The Evolution of Social Structure in the Iterated Prisoner'sDilemma
American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 2. (Apr., 1996), pp. 278-307

Still no qualifications as an "environmentalist" so what and who exactly is Lomborg?

He's an associate professorin statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. I could insert the standard jokes about statistics here but I'm sure most people have heard them anyway (having done a semester of statistics probably makes me more qualified to talk stats than he is to talk environment).

So he's not an environmentalist, is he a sceptic? From his site:

Q: Does Lomborg deny man-made global warming exists?
A: No. In Cool It he writes: "global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century" (p8).

Q: But he used to deny it, didn't he?
A: No. In both his first Danish book in 1998 and the English version of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, Bjorn Lomborg stressed that man-made global warming exists. The introduction to a section on climate change in The Skeptical Environmentalist clearly states, "This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming" (p259).

Q: Does he believe we should do anything about global warming?
A: Yes. As Bjorn Lomborg argues in 'Cool It', we should focus on the smartest solutions to the problems that the world faces, whether we're dealing with climate change, communicable diseases, malnutrition, agricultural subsidies, or anything else. Lomborg finds that the smartest way to tackle global warming is to invest heavily in R&D in non-carbon emitting technologies, which will enable everyone to switch over to cheaper-than-fossil-fuel technologies sooner and thus dramatically reduce the 21st century emissions. Specifically, he suggests a ten-fold increase in R&D in non-CO2 -emitting energy technologies like solar, wind, carbon capture, fusion, fission, energy conservation etc.... This is entirely in line with the top recommendation from the Copenhagen Consensus 2008, which includes some of the word's top economists and five Nobel Laureates.

Lomborg also supports a CO 2 tax comparable with the central or high estimates of CO2 damages. That means an estimate in the range of $2-14 per ton of CO 2, but not the unjustifiably high taxes of $20-40 implicit in Kyoto or the even higher ones ($85) suggested by the Stern report or Gore ($140).

So it appears he's not a sceptic either. He accepts the reality of climate change and that it is man made and that we should do something about it or it will have a "serious impact".

[ColinJEly]

Sceptic
We and our children will find out what the real 'truth is out there!' we only have a finite amount of money, people and time. So lets just pray that our elected representatives (god help us!) make the right decisions about what is a real problem and what is scaremongering! Ask the Brits this month what they think of 'Global Warming?' I'm sure they'd love some!

[Shirley Henderson]

That opening by Maude Barlow was amazing! Spot on. I am going to send this to everyone I know. More people need to hear this! I definitley agree about the looking after the waterways, the people of this country and to stop worring about BIG business, exports and trade. I believe we need to get back to small business, small farms and eating and buying close to home. Well said!
Fantastic. lets pass it on.
I have said the same thing myself and its really the millionares and the greedy rich that are hurting the most. They dont have enough millions. They will never have enough Lets get realistic and balance out the give and take. We probably can live sustainably, fairly and take care of the environment too if everyone could understand this crisis and get on board. It's NOT about money, money, money it's about living, and living well. I cannot be happy living well if the animals are dead, there are no plants and only desert. I want to live in a balanced world that cares about the environment, living creatures, forests, clean water and general well being.
Shirley

[duane]

Five years to save world from climate change, says WWF
By Environment reporter Sarah Clarke for AM



Posted Mon Oct 19, 2009 8:17am AEDT
Updated Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:03am AEDT


Five years or there's no turning back: The WWF says the world has to wean itself off its fossil fuel dependence (www.flickr.com: Fabio Pinheiro)

Audio: WWF report warns of 2014 climate deadline (AM)
A new report has given world leaders a deadline of 2014 to embrace a low-carbon economy or see the planet hit a "point of no return".

The economic modelling, commissioned by WWF Australia, has found that an emissions trading scheme is not enough to drive the change needed to sufficiently cut global emissions.

Instead, it says governments must rapidly put in place greater incentives for industry to make the transition.

Karl Mallon, a scientist with Climate Risk and one of the key authors of the report, says 2014 has been calculated as the point at which there is no longer enough time to develop the industries that can deliver a low carbon economy.

"The point of no return," he said.

"If we wait until past 2014 or that's what modelling shows, then simply put, it will be impossible for industries to grow to the scale that has to be achieved in the time that is available.

"So essentially, we'll miss the target and I guess then we are left with the consequences of what happens if we go above two degrees warming."

The report is a global assessment and warns "rapid change" is crucial.

It has found that currently only three out of 20 industries are moving fast enough and an emissions trading scheme or carbon price will not be enough to deliver the transformation needed to achieve the emissions cuts.

Dr Mallon says that even if Australia was to act now and start growing a low-carbon market today, these industries would still have to grow by 24 per cent a year - a goal that is hard to meet.

"There's really no time for any low-carbon industry to sit idle," he said.

"So what that means is that there a suite of industries for example in the renewable energy and carbon capture and storage areas that will have to be mobilised within the period between now and 2014.

"There are also industries in the ... energy-efficiency area. There is also a very important heavy lift that needs to happen in the agricultural sector and in the forestry sectors, largely, if you like, all aspects of a modern economy will have to start the process of transformation quite soon."

Environment groups warn this is a wake-up call for policymakers.

WWF Australia chief executive Greg Bourne says it is time the world weans itself off fossil fuels, otherwise the circumstances could be catastrophic.

"If we end up with runaway climate change, we could be heading towards a five-to-six-degree temperature rise by the end of the century," he said.

"That is devastating for the economy. It is devastating for agriculture. It is devastating for our iconic landscapes, our biodiversity. It is truly frightening.

"We can win but we have to get after it. We have to move faster and we have to create an industrial and agricultural revolution the like of which we have never seen."



the impending abyss is imminent....all the signs are there!! We need to move quickly, because the climb out of the abyss is impossible.

[CJW]

Thanks Duane for the enlightened post. Having been involved in the effort to halt water privitisation many years ago with a small conservation group, I am not surprised to see what the outcome of this privatisation has been. Very sad indeed.
I'm sorry to have to tell all that the government here in Viet Nam is also desperately building dams along all their waterways in a futile attempt to conserve enough water from the rapidly declining rainfall situation here. Evaporation, salination, bule green algal blooms and loss of numerous species will shortly follow these futile attempts as per your posting.
I am going to dip my paddle into the water of "climate change denialism" with an offer of the following post that I found to be quite an inspiration to continue the struggle for wisdom and common sence to prevail:
Johann Hari
How I wish the global warming deniers were right...
Posted by Johann Hari about one day ago.


Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world – of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way. I hate the world to come that I've seen in my reporting from continent after continent - of falling Arctic ice shelves, of countries being swallowed by the sea, of vicious wars for the water and land that remains. When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.



But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun's rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you'd fail a geography GCSE).



Yet half our fellow citizens are choosing to believe the deniers who say there must be gaps between these statements big enough to fit an excuse for carrying on as we are. Shrieking at them is not going to succeed.



Our first response has to be to accept that this denial is an entirely natural phenomenon. The facts of global warming are inherently weird, and they run contrary to our evolved instincts. If you burn an odourless, colourless gas in Europe, it will cause the Arctic to melt and Bangladesh to drown and the American Mid-West to dry up? By living our normal lives, doing all the things we have been brought up doing, we can make great swathes of the planet uninhabitable? If your first response is incredulity, then you're a normal human being.



It's tempting to allow this first response to harden into a dogma, and use it to cover your eyes. The oil and gas industries have been spending billions to encourage us to stay stuck there, because their profits will plummet when we make the transition to a low-carbon society. But the basic science isn't actually very complicated, or hard to grasp. As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. Every single year since 1917 has been hotter than 1917. Every single year since 1956 has been hotter than 1956. Every single year since 1992 has been hotter than 1992. And on, and on. If we dramatically increase the carbon dioxide even more – as we are – we will dramatically increase the warming. Many parts of the world will dry up or flood or burn.



This is such an uncomfortable claim that I too I have tried to grasp at any straw that suggests it is wrong. One of the most tempting has come in the past few weeks, when the emails of the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia were hacked into, and seem on an initial reading to show that a few of their scientists were misrepresenting their research to suggest the problem is slightly worse than it is. Some people have seized on it as a fatal blow – a Pentagon Papers for global warming.



But then I looked at the facts. It was discovered more than a century ago that burning fossil fuels would release warming gases and therefore increase global temperatures, and since then, hundreds of thousands of scientists have independently reached the conclusion that it will have terrible consequences. It would be very surprising if, somewhere among them, there wasn't a charlatan or two who over-hyped their work. Such people exist in every single field of science (and they are deplorable).



So let's knock out the Hadley Centre's evidence. Here are just a fraction of the major scientific organisations that have independently verified the evidence that man-made global warming is real, and dangerous: Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, L'Academie des Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the UK's Royal Society, the Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the US Environmental Protection Agency... I could fill this entire article with these names.



And they haven't only used one method to study the evidence. They've used satellite data, sea level measurements, borehole analysis, sea ice melt, permafrost melt, glacial melt, drought analysis, and on and on. All of this evidence from all of these scientists using all these methods has pointed in one direction. As the conservative journalist Hugo Rifkind put it, the Hadley Centre no more discredits climate science than Harold Shipman discredits GPs.



A study for the journal Science randomly sampled 928 published peer-reviewed scientific papers that used the words "climate change". It found that 100 per cent – every single one – agreed it is being fuelled by human activity. There is no debate among climate scientists. There are a few scientists who don't conduct research into the climate who disagree, but going to them to find out how global warming works is a bit like going to a chiropodist and asking her to look at your ears.



Part of the confusion in the public mind seems to stem from the failure to understand that two things are happening at once. There has always been – and always will be – natural variation in the climate. The ebb from hot to cold is part of Planet Earth. But on top of that, we are adding a large human blast of warming – and it is disrupting the natural rhythm. So when, in opinion polls, people say warming is "natural", they are right, but it's only one part of the story.



Once you have grasped this, it's easy to see through the claim that global warming stopped in 1998 and the world has been cooling ever since. In 1998, two things came together: the natural warming process of El Nino was at its peak, and our human emissions of warming gases were also rising – so we got the hottest year ever recorded. Then El Nino abated, but the carbon emissions kept up. That's why the world has remained far warmer than before – eight of the 10 hottest years on record have happened in the past decade – without quite reaching the same peak. Again: if we carry on pumping out warming gases, we will carry on getting warmer.



That's why I won't use the word "sceptic" to describe the people who deny the link between releasing warming gases and the planet getting warmer. I am a sceptic. I have looked at the evidence highly critically, desperate for flaws. The overwhelming majority of scientists are sceptics: the whole nature of scientific endeavour is to check and check and check again for a flaw in your theory or your evidence. Any properly sceptical analysis leads to the conclusion that man-made global warming is real. Denial is something different: it is when no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, could convince you. It is a faith-based position.



So let's – for the sake of argument – make an extraordinary and unjustified concession to the deniers. Let's imagine there was only a 50 per cent chance that virtually all the world's climate scientists are wrong. Would that be a risk worth taking? Are you prepared to take a 50-50 gamble on the habitability of the planet? Is the prospect of getting our energy from the wind and the waves and the sun so terrible that's not worth it on even these wildly optimistic odds?



Imagine you are about to get on a plane with your family. A huge group of qualified airline mechanics approach you on the tarmac and explain they've studied the engine for many years and they're sure it will crash if you get on board. They show you their previous predictions of plane crashes, which have overwhelmingly been proven right. Then a group of vets, journalists, and plumbers tell they have looked at the diagrams and it's perfectly obvious to them the plane is safe and that airplane mechanics – all of them, everywhere – are scamming you. Would you get on the plane? That is our choice at Copenhagen.



About Johann
Johann Hari is an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post. He also writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The New Republic, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, South Africa's Star, The Irish Times, and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines. Read more about Johann...
Email
johann@johannhari.com

[duane]

Col

On this forum I have never stated once that we do not have GW or CC.

What I have said is that CO2 is not the cause of either.

Anthropogenic changes over centuries have seen the wholesale clearing of vegetation from all continents.

The position on GW and CC that we have taken is that the disruption caused by the removal of plants and the water cycle have had a very major impact on climate.

check out the blog http://naturalsequencefarming.com/forum ... highlight=

[CJW]

G'day Duane,
You have misunderstood my reference to CC GW, in that I had no intention if inferring that you might be involved in any way in denialism. I leave this position to another well known blogger who persists on this site.

[Angela Helleren]

Thanks for sharing the excellent articles duane and CJW.

Both worth reading over again!
This grandmother, also learned a new word and it's meaning.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anthropogenic

–adjective
caused or produced by humans: anthropogenic air pollution.

[Angela Helleren]

Col

On this forum I have never stated once that we do not have GW or CC.

What I have said is that CO2 is not the cause of either.

Anthropogenic changes over centuries have seen the wholesale clearing of vegetation from all continents.

The position on GW and CC that we have taken is that the disruption caused by the removal of plants and the water cycle have had a very major impact on climate.

check out the blog http://naturalsequencefarming.com/forum ... highlight=

My take on GW an CC
The worlds population has doubled+ since the 1950's.

Manufacturing to meeting the needs, wants and excesses, mainly through the use of fossil fuels has seen greater increases in CO2 levels.

Mother natures work is never done, but will the family survive the cleanup? Answer - Only if we all pitch in to clean up our mess!