Allan Taylor: What, don’t coal/gas/nuclear power stations have parts which wear out and require maintenance? And coal/gas/nuclear power plants are pretty damned expensive in terms of their environmental effects. Silly argument like most of the garbage on this blog.

Both methods are very expensive ways of generating electicity of an intermittant nature.

In a dust storm I can imagine solar panels being coated in dust which must be cleaned off to maintain efficiency, such as it may be. Extra Green jobs?

Wind turbines would be susceptible to dust in their workings. The gear boxes wear out rapidly. Average life span is said to be about 10 years.

What we need is a weather-proof way of generating electricity, by using coal, gas or nuclear power.

If they had bothered to spend just a few minutes extra on each plot and recorded DBH for each tree they would have been able to determine the stand basal area and compare it with the natural capacity of the site. They would then have been able to distinguish between the fully stocked sites, which would stop supplying koala food early in a dry spell, and the partially stocked sites that would maintain food supply for longer.

They would also have been able to identify fully stocked stands with excess small trees with minimal capacity for additional growth. These stands would be the first to go into moisture deficit and produce the least amount of koala food, even in good seasons. Instead, Pahl lumped these sites into the high quality habitat category, based on raw stem numbers, when other sites with better spaced secondary food species were ignored.

They completely lacked the wit to realise that any size tree in a partially stocked stand will produce much more than double the koala food, and for longer, of the same tree in a fully stocked stand. So the ten fold variance they ignored with tree size alone, was closer to a thirty fold variance in actual food supply. And that is before we look at nuances in run-off and ground water flow systems that could easily take the range of variance out to forty fold.

Instead, they focussed on the four species with the most pellets and only a 3 fold range of variation. And they did so without any consideration of the role of secondary species in getting these animals through a dry spell.

Chloe,
Thanks for the tip on Aboriginal burning. I will read with interest about the Pintupis. Am I right in thinking that your name is Greek for ‘green’?

Kuhnkat,
I agree. Personally, I apply the Precautionary Principle most rigorously to applications of the Precautionary Principle. So rigorously, that I never apply it. Don’t blame me. Although descended from Dafydd ap Llywelyn, my forty-ninth (or thereabouts) great grandmother was Aoife McMurrough, from the Land of Saints and Scholars.

When applied properly and lawfully, the precautionary principle demands that the green movement be ousted from all aspects of ecological stewardship on the basis of detailed, proven and specific evidence of incompetence.

The impact of their closed canopy fetish on soil moisture balances, microbial fertility, leaf moisture and nutrient levels, and the quality and dependability of wildlife food supplies was entirely foreseeable. Yet, they comprehensively failed in their duty of care to the wildlife they so publicly assumed exclusive responsibility for.

I have a copy of Pahl, L (1990) “Koala and Bushland Survey of West and Central Logan City” which provides important insights into the ecological competence of the past two decades of Koala “protection” policy in the broader region. Both the Australian Koala Foundation and the Qld National Parks and Wildlife Service had input into the planning of the survey. And the most useful information it provides is a very clear picture of what these people didn’t understand and didn’t want know.

The aim of the survey was to “identify the most important habitats and corridors of Koalas and to show the location of these on maps of Logan City”. It consisted of 954 sample plots with a total of 47,043 trees (larger than 10cm), comprised of 34 tree species grouped into 20 distinct tree communities. Each tree species was assigned a koala preference rating on the basis of 6,674 recorded faecal pellets. The preference ratings of each of the four major food trees were then multiplied by their respective densities in each of the twenty tree communities to enable their ranking in terms of koala habitat quality.

The tree communities with the highest density of the four primary food tree species were regarded as the ones most likely to support a stable breeding colony of koalas.

The problem with this analysis was that they did not bother to record the size of each tree to determine the approximate canopy (leaf) area of each tree. So a smaller tree with, say, 3 pellets could have the same statistical weighting as a very large tree with 3 pellets. And small trees of a species that koalas feed on were given the same ecological weight as a large tree of the same species.

Yet, koalas rarely feed on trees with diameter less than 20cm for the very good reason that the leaves are all at the top and the small branches will not support their weight. A tree of 15 cm DBH will generally only have a crown diameter 15 times the DBH, or 2.25 metres. So the branch that supports the leaves will only be 1 metre long and, at standard 1% taper, will only be 1 cm thick at the trunk and only 5mm out where the koala would need to be to reach the leaves. In reality he would find himself flat on his back on the ground with a twig of leaves in his hand.

Conversely, known koala feed trees, like E maculata (spotted gum), E fibrosa and drepanaophylla (grey & red ironbark), E nigra (white stringybark), and E signata (scribbly gum) were not included in the compilation of koala habitat groups. The so-called “koala preference rating” was nothing more than a simplistic division of the total number of scats found under all trees of each species, without regard for the total number of trees of each species, or their size or leaf area.

So they had no way of gaining any meaningful insight into the actual condition of these habitats, nor even, if they were actual habitats at all. Some of the groupings appear to have had as many as 3000 stems per hectare which would mean an average stem diameter of only 12cm. Others had only 200 stems/ha which would indicate an average stem diameter of 47cm. Most would have a mixture of a few large former paddock trees and a dense infilling of smaller trees. But our resident koala “experts” did not feel the need to know whether all the pellets assigned to a particular tree species came from a few isolated large trees while numerous small ones had no pellets at all.

In short, they didn’t have the faintest idea of what they needed to know. And they didn’t have the faintest idea of what the koalas actually had and even less idea of what they actually needed.

the Precautionery Principle says you should rush in. My saying labels those who follow the Precautionery Principle, especially when taken to extremes, fools in my estimation.

Is that a rephrasing of the Precautionary Principle? I have not seen it quoted much since a French lawyer pointed out that, applied to itself, it can rapidly disappear up its own fundament.

thank you for a very enlightening post.

It would seem that ecotypes and gubmint share a common theme representative of this old saying:

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!! ;>)

Funny you should mention this.

We lived on the farm in Trentham East Vic. for over twenty years, our property was surrounded by state forest on 3 sides, dense as can be. We had quite a few acres with scattered gum trees ourselves and I noticed the unusual numbers of koalas, unusual in a sense that I hardly seen as many in the forest itself, and we walked the bush very often.

At the time i did not think of a reason, but with hindsight, there is a lot to what Ian said.