Since then it has been confirmed that salinity is not such a big problem in Queensland and the secret that tree clearing is not responsible for salinity has been let out of the bag.

A more detailed review of the extent of dryland salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin of southern Queensland now indicates there is a total of 9428 ha of salt affected land. This was reported in 2003 to be a 400% increase on a previous study in 1991, supporting the concept of a rapidly increasing problem.

However, in the fine print of this report we find that the bulk of this salt affected land, almost 7000 hectares, was contained in two areas where natural salinity has been observed since mankind first explored Queensland.

The biggest of these is referred to as the Yelarbon desert, where hard setting saline soils have been degraded by grazing. It is certainly not a pretty area, but has always been salty and the report admits it is ‘primary’ salinity rather than ‘secondary’ salinity, which is induced by farming.

This official estimate now indicates that salinity ‘development’ in the Queensland part of the Murray Darling Basin is confined to 2459 hectares, somewhat less than the prediction that it was likely to affect 628,000 hectares of land in this area. It currently comprises 192 salt expressions, with an average size of 13 hectares, affecting one hectare in 10,000.

Now, I am the first person to admit that salinity deserves attention, but the point I am making here is that the salinity problem in Queensland is not large and it is not escalating.

In fact there has been some good results with salinity control and the area affected has declined in recent years. An example of this is on one of the largest outbreaks to the north of Oakey. The ground water at this site is not too salty to use on pastures, and pumping for irrigation has lowered the water table and produced a good profit at the same time. As the water table has dropped, salt levels in the soil have retreated and gradually the productivity of the salt affected land is being regained.

A lot of emphasis was put on the need to halt tree clearing in Queensland to prevent the development of salinity. Not only has the salinity problem been exaggerated, the commonly accepted theory that salinity is caused by tree clearing, has been scrutinized and found wanting.

One of the most intensely researched areas of salinity is in the Liverpool Plains region of NSW. Careful monitoring, backed up by computer modeling has found the clearing of vegetation on the upper slopes to be a relatively minor contributor to ground water and the salinity problem. Small amounts of drainage over large areas of cultivation and runoff pooling on the valley floor have been found to be the important contributors to salinity.

Tree clearing on the hills of the Darling Downs, has been blamed for salinity. But the soils on these hills are shallow and do not hold a lot of moisture. If there is significant rainfall, it does not make any difference whether the vegetation is trees or grass, the soil cannot hold much water and some escapes to drainage.

Drainage which could cause rising water tables is very limited on clay soils as we go westwards. Research and modeling by rangeland ecologists suggest tree clearing has almost no impact on deep soil drainage on clay soils where the rainfall is less than 500 mm.

This means that in the western areas where most of the tree clearing was being conducted in Queensland, there is almost no impact of tree clearing on salinity.

Salinity hazard maps drawn up for Queensland were a big furphy. Large areas of Queensland were coloured in red, indicating a high salinity hazard. However, the reason for this classification in many areas, was that the soil contained a significant amount of salt in the subsoil. The ‘Catch 22’ here is that the salt has built up at depth in these soils over thousands of years, because they have very little drainage. If there is very little drainage, there is very little risk of salinity.

Where there is a problem, salinity deserves attention. Like many of our land degradation issues there are
ways to change farming practices which not only reduce the problem, but which can increase farm profit at the same time.

However some of the answers to salinity, such as agroforestry, salt tolerant pastures and more productive farming systems are having impacts in other ways. Forests planted in parts of Western Australia have reduced runoff into urban water storages. Last time I was out in the Western Australian wheat belt looking at salinity, the comment was made that if effective strategies for salinity control were widely implemented in the catchment to the west of Perth, it would stop the water flow in the Swan River.

The irony of salinity is that it is a problem caused by an excess of water in a dry country. Attention is now switching from salinity being a major curse, to how we can make use of the surplus water, even if it is salty. In Southern states, salt tolerant grass species are being used to utilize more of the water and restart production on saline areas.

One of the most productive ways to use salty water in the future will be to grow algae in ponds and harvest it for conversion to biodiesel. Algae is the most productive plant we can use to convert sunlight into energy and these plants can tolerate salt in a watery environment.

———————-
First published in the Courier Mail on 25th August and republished here with permission from the author.

The project was explained on Television, on Channel Nine’s Sunday Program:

“ROSS COULTHART: Courtesy of this month’s Budget, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has another half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to spend. Much of it will be going on expensive schemes to stop salt reaching the rivers similar to this one in northern Victoria near Pyramid Hill. This is Pyramid Salt a private company funded with $13 million dollars of taxpayers’ money. Here they pump saline water from underground and harvest the salt it contains, for sale.

Does it make you laugh that people in Sydney are paying six bucks for a 250g box of salt that you blokes are desperate to throw away in this part of the world?

GAVIN PRIVETT, project manager, Pyramid Salt: No it doesn’t make me laugh. Actually, it makes me cry because the in-between guy is getting all the money.

ROSS COULTHART: But it’s only here at all because of an environmental blunder years ago, when attempts to lower the watertable under here ended up poisoning the Murray River.

GAVIN PRIVETT: Initially, what they looked at, they started putting drainage systems and then the problem was they realised they were transferring the problem from one place to another. They put in drainage systems. The next thing it was going into the Murray.

WENDY CRAIK: That’s true and I think that’s a fact of life, that science moves on, that people learn more about systems, learn more about what they should and shouldn’t do.

ROSS COULTHART: So it’s a multi-million dollar patch-up for a past mistake and it’s not a long-term solution for salinity.

GAVIN PRIVETT: You can’t put projects like this all over the place. One, people don’t eat enough salt. It’s a low value commodity. It’s not the answer to the problem. What we’re doing is we’re just intervening and I believe it’s probably as a short-term fix which we’re probably looking to buy some time.”

Its not only a “multi-million dollar patch-up”, the salt interception scheme is using groundwater, extracting groundwater, to evaporate the salt.

I explained in my last blog post with reference to a recent report titled ‘Risks to the shared water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ written by the CSIRO and published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, in particular the section titled ‘Groundwater Extraction’, that groundwater stores are declining at alarming rates and that there is a high level of groundwater extraction in the Shepparton-Katunga region from the salt interception schemes.

The Pyramid Creek Salt Interception Scheme is in this region.

But this is the spin that the Murray Darling Basin Commission put on it in the media release announcing the prize:

“National Prize highlights continuing fight against salinity

A joint public-private salt harvesting scheme that each year diverts 22,000 tonnes of salt from the Murray River today won the prestigious Engineers’ Australia National Salinity Prize.

The prize for new technology and other practical outcomes tackling salinity was awarded to Pyramid Creek Salt Interception and Harvesting Scheme by the Governor-General, Major General Michael Jeffery, AC, CVO, MC at Parliament House Canberra.

The first stage of the $13 million Pyramid Creek Salt Interception Scheme near Kerang, Victoria, was opened in April this year and is funded by the Victorian, South Australian, New South Wales and Australian Governments through the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC).

Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) has overseen construction and now manages the scheme on behalf of the MDBC’s partner governments, while Pyramid Salt run the commercial salt harvesting facility.

MDBC Chief Executive Dr Wendy Craik said MDBC co-sponsor the award as it serves to highlight the ongoing battle against salinity across Australia.

Dr Craik said the consensus of scientific knowledge underpinned the commitment Basin governments have consistently shown by investing in such schemes. “This prize will further encourage the important ongoing debate about the salinity challenges faced by the nation”.

“This prize also acknowledges the positive effects such projects have on communities, the environment and the local economy.

“One of a network of engineering works, schemes like Pyramid Creek make immediate gains against salinity Basin-wide and form part of the $60 million Basin Salinity Management Strategy supported by all Basin governments,” Dr Craik said.

“More than 1,000 tonnes of salt would enter the Murray River system every day were it not for the operation of these schemes at strategic points along the river”.

Pyramid Creek, like several other salt interception schemes, is a large-scale groundwater pumping and drainage project that intercepts water flows and disposes of them, generally by evaporation. The salt is then harvested for commercial purposes.”

What’s the relative value of the water to the salt?

What about a prize for a technology that gets rid of the salt without evaporating the water?

If funding is secured on the basis of the best available information, even if it is subsequently shown to be wrong, then there is no case for deceit or fraud. However, if an organisation or individual secures public money on the perception that salt levels are rising, that dryland salinity is spreading, or that an area is at risk of salinity, while withholding information that shows the opposite to be true, then there is a case for fraud. And I would suggest the culprits be treated no differently to the former Enron executives.

Professor David Pannell, University of Western Australia, made the following comments at John Quiggin’s blog in response to a question about how the scientists managed to be so wrong on salinity::

“I’ve spoken to people who know exactly how it happened. It was a mixture of several things: failure to anticipate the dire political consequences of defining salinity hazard in the broad way they did (although they were warned); succumbing to pressure to provide results despite a lack of data; and in at least one state, yes, a shameless determination to ride the political wave right to the money-laden beach.”

It is not a well kept secret that senior Queensland bureacrats generated maps that falsely suggested large areas were at risk of dryland salinity simply to secure money from the federal government under the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. If the same individuals were heading corporations, there would probably be more interest from the Australian media and other bloggers.

That’s not to say there aren’t some companies that have pocketed money from the same “political wave”, to quote from one email received yesterday:

“The bad guys are not limited to the public sector either. Some of the worst abuses I’ve seen have been by private consulting firms shamelessly providing the answer that they perceived a state government wanted.”

But the amount these companies have received is probably minuscule relative to what state governments have pocketed.

Last Sunday on Channel Nine, Nick Farrow and Ross Colthart went further than anyone has ever gone in exposing the politics of salinity in Australia. They began the program by suggesting that:

“Things are going badly wrong in public science.”

Perhaps the next step is a judicial inquiry.

In my opinion the model has some application, but lets start with a basic description of the theory:

If you dig a hole in the sand at the beach, or a bore in your backyard, chances are you will strike water at some depth. This water is often referred to as ‘ground water’.

The ‘rising ground water’ theory is essentially based on the idea that if you remove lots of trees from an area or irrigate an area, then more water will percolate down than would occur naturally and the ground water will eventually rise. If there is a lot of salt in the landscape the rising groundwater will be salty.

The theory is applicable to many irrigation areas and I have previously written about how Murray Irrigation Ltd, in the NSW Riverina, has dramatically reduced the area at risk of salinity working from this model (click here for that blog post).

I have also acknowledged the value of salt interception schemes along the Murray River (click here for an article recently published by Online Opinion). These schemes are based on the idea that if the rising ground water is intercepted, and the water evaporated and salt collected, the amount of salt entering the Murray River will be reduced and salt levels will fall.

But a potential problem with salt interception schemes is that they can draw groundwater from a distance away, and in this way potentially suck the soil profile dry of water.

It really depends on whether the groundwater is confined or whether the ground water covers a much larger area and may be flowing underground along, for example, old river beds.

A fellow called Geoff emailed the following comment yesterday:

“As I see it and please correct me if I am wrong, there has been a blanket campaign to lower water tables to combat salinity. In reality, some areas need to lower their water tables while others have no water table problems. In fact these areas need to increase the water infiltration to leach the root zone salt down the profile.

Chisel plowing, stubble retention, avoiding excessive grazing are all well established and accepted ways of increasing this water infiltration by increasing the organic matter and bacterial activity in the soil. And, dare I say it; clearing trees followed by careful soil husbandry would be the preferred option in many areas.”

It is worth remembering that many people in rural and regional Australian rely on groundwater for ’stock and domestic’ as well as irrigation and that groundwater is not necessarily salty. Groundwater is mostly a very valuable resource and while the National Land and Water Audit gave the impression it is everywhere increasing in abundance, the reality is quite the opposite (click here for a Land column I wrote on this issue).

In summary the rising ground water model has some application, but I don’t believe it has general application outside of irrigation areas in eastern Australia. I am less familiar with the situation in Western Australia. The model probably has limited application through most of Queensland and NSW and yet it has been applied inappropriately across this landscape including through the National Land and Water Audit, and specifically at places like Dick Creek (click here for BrianTunstall’s explanation as to why Dick’s Creek is a soil heath rather than rising ground water issue).

Professor Pannell, from Western Australia, has a different view. He has posted comment at his website defending the rising groundwater model and suggesting it has general application including in eastern Australia. He also supports Wendy Craik’s view that the drought has lowered water tables. But hang on, which drought? Despite all the hype, the rainfall record for the Murray Darling Basin as recorded by the Australian Bureau of Meterology does not suggest the last few years have been partiucularly dry:

The last very dry year was 2002 and that wasn’t unusually dry in the scheme of things.

Professor Pannell writes:

“Contrary to the claims expressed on the [Sunday] program, there is copious evidence in support of the rising groundwater model, including a catchment in WA [Western Australia] where groundwater and stream salinity levels have been monitored ever since the land was cleared. There are numerous areas where establishment of perennial vegetation has lowered watertables and thereby mitigated salinity (e.g. Burke’s Flat in Victoria, the Denmark River in WA).

Powerful recent evidence in the Murray-Darling Basin has been the decline in saline discharge in many areas, due to extended periods of below-average rainfall. For example, in a site at Kamarooka (northern Victoria), there was formerly a large area of saline discharge, but the recent dry period has lowered saline groundwaters to 2 metres or more below the surface for the first time in 50 years. This widely observed recent phenomenon is completely consistent with the groundwater model of salinity, and (unless I’ve misunderstood it) completely inconsistent with the soil-health model. The same is true of the fall in salinity in the Murray River, which was rightly emphasised in the program.

… I’d also be very interested to know how the alternative model explains the onset of salinity affecting roads and buildings in the middle of rural towns, or occurring within remnant native vegetation (where soil health is presumably pretty good). It seems to me that these things can only be explained by rising groundwater.”

In fact a bit has been written about ‘lateral flow’ and ’soil health’ to explain impacts on roads and other infrastructure from salt, click here for a piece by Ken Tretheway and Rob Gourlay.

“The Channel Nine Sunday Program on Salt Solutions (28 May 2006) was a wake-up call to public workers involved in dryland salinity science and administration in Australia.

There is evidence that points to possible scientific fraud and deceit in salinity science and management that is controlled and manipulated by Australian and State government agencies.

Public workers have used a rising groundwater model based on claims that land clearing causes the groundwater to rise and bring salts to the surface. Computer predictions by government agencies during the 1990’s promoted a dramatic spread of salinity across southern Australia.

Public workers have operated as a cartel to control public funds on dryland salinity and exclude private industry R&D, innovations and services from funding schemes. Evidence now suggests that the public science and predictions were hopelessly flawed.

Many government agencies attempted to suppress contrary evidence from private industry and published false information about the capability of industry technology, while promoting their own mapping technologies and engineering solutions to attract public funds.

Environmental Research and Information Consortium Pty Ltd (ERIC) was one of the companies with an award winning technology in salinity mapping affected by the lock out within government agencies. ERIC has answered questions raised by public workers during the investigation by Channel Nine. These papers are at http://www.eric.com.au/html/news.html.

ERIC, along with many other independent scientists and farmers have demonstrated that degradation in soil health is the primary cause of an increase in dryland salinity from natural levels. This includes a significant loss of soil carbon and microbes, soil compaction and loss of soil structure (eg. hardpans); caused by conventional methods of agriculture. This degradation has caused less rainfall/irrigation percolation to the groundwater, soil salts to be released into the soil water and increased lateral flows of salts into drainage lines and low lying areas.
Public workers have been provided with this alternative evidence to the rising groundwater model since the 1950’s.

ERIC produced conclusive evidence in 1994 and provided further evidence to the National Dryland Salinity Program in 1997, including the House of Representative Salinity Inquiry in 2004 and Senate Salinity Inquiry in 2006. However, public workers have continually failed to produce evidence to support a rising groundwater model and actively denigrated ERIC’s evidence without disproving the evidence.

The Australian public needs to know the extent of the cover-up and protection racket by these public workers. An independent investigation is now required by the Australian government to get to the bottom of the claims in the Channel Nine Sunday Program.”

A full transcript of the program is available, click here.

Bob knew I was struggling with dryland salinity issues, that I was feeling outraged by the methodology used by the National Land and Water Audit to propose that 17 million hectares of farmland in Australia was likely to become salt affected within 50 years. The actual area showing signs of salinity was estimated at 2 million hectares in 2002. This area was thought to be contracting. So government scientists may have overstated the aggregate dryland salinity problem by as much as 88 percent.

I contacted Brian Tunstall, and subsequently met his colleague Rob Gourlay. Both work for ERIC an environmental consulting company.

It was apparent to me back then, that government scientists had used a very simplistic and flawed methodology as a basis for successfully lobbying for $1.4 billion in funding. I didn’t have as much a problem with the model they were using, as the way they were applying it.

It was good to met Rob and Brian. They not only had a problem with the methodology but also with the actual rising groundwater model. Brian and Rob’s central thesis is that dryland salinity is really a soil health issue, a symptom of soil degradation not a result of rising water tables.

Brian is in the promo, click here, for tomorrow’s Channel 9 Sunday program. He’s the one saying, “It’s a disaster for farmers and its a disaster for science”.

Brian has put together some online articles that provide more background on dryland salinity, click here.

Following is an extract from one of articles at the ERIC website, explaining why one of the most publicised examples of dryland salinity in NSW is a consequence of overgrazing rather than rising groundwater. Obviously correctly diagnosing a cause, is usually the critical first step to finding and implementing an appropriate solution!

“The most publicised example of dryland salinity in NSW occurs at Dicks Creek just outside the ACT. This has long been used to illustrate the applicability of the [flawed] rising groundwater model and the seriousness of the dryland salinity problem.

The site is routinely visited by tours with the next stop being a site where the salinity problem is identified as having been solved through revegetation. Prince Charles has taken the tour and Mr Carr used the site as a backdrop for an announcement of new initiatives to address the environment.

With the rising groundwater model, tree clearing on hills is said to increase the percolation to groundwater with the adverse salinity occurring through this water rising to the surface on the plains. The rising water is said to bring salt to the surface from sub-surface stores. The water and salt are generally said to move vertically upwards on the plains although it is seldom clear whether the rising relates to upward movement or a failure to drain. However, in drained landscapes upward movement is necessary for subsurface salt stores on the plains to be bought to the surface.

A photograph of the highly publicised site (see above) shows appreciable woody vegetation on the hills. Moreover, those familiar with landscape hydrology recognise that the water is draining down the hill slope over and through the soil. There is an incised drainage gully which drains water from the soil profile and prevents water from moving vertically upward. The water associated with the impact is not part of any groundwater system and the flow is primarilylateral with all vertical movement being down.

Further issues arise when measurements are obtained of salinity. The electrical conductivity (EC) of a 1:5 soil water suspension is around 2.9 ms/cm for the surface soil and 2.3 ms/cm for the subsoil. There is excess salt but the agricultural rating for such levels is slightly saline with yields of sensitive crops being affected.

The land degradation at the site has arisen through grazing. Livestock have disturbed the surface soil and the lateral flow of water down the slope has eroded the dispersible soil. It is a typical example of hill slope erosion where the erosion is occurring through seepage of water through the soil as well as surface runoff. Salt is an issue but in terms of composition rather than amount with sodium promoting the dispersion of clay.”

Brian goes on to ask the question, “Why the misrepresentation?”.

Brian then quotes from a paper by CSIRO scientist John Passioura titled ‘From propaganda to practicalities – the progressive evolution of the salinity debate’ (.Aust. J. Expt. Agric. 45, 1503-06).

This is perhaps the first paper in which a CSIRO scientist acknowledges the extent to which the rising groundwater salinity model has some major flaws. In the paper John Passioura suggests that, “Our only defence against the charge of charlatanry is that before deceiving others we have taken great pains to deceive ourselves.”

Tunstall comments,

“This identifies that the deceptions associated with dryland salinity have arisen from public research scientists.

The difficulty with the suggested defence is that self deceit is a fundamental characteristic of charlatanry. As self deceit is integral to charlatanry it is no defence and the comment attempts to justify the unjustifiable.”

I know of scientists within CSIRO who were not at all decieved, but they couldn’t see how to speak up. Afterall, to suggest the problem might not be as bad as suggested was to invite the wrath of many so-called experts.

In my discussions with John Quiggin over the Murray River, he has been reluctant to consider the evidence. For him, and many others, it’s been a case of backing the orthodox view, also known as ‘the consensus’.

Anyway, some months ago a producer at Channel 9’s Sunday program contacted me. Nick Farrow said that he had heard that I had information showing that salinity levels in the Murray River were falling, not rising. I sent him a copy of ‘Myth and the Murray’.

Some weeks later I was interviewed by Ross Coulthart, also from Sunday, and in the following video clip, click here, which is an advertisement for this week’s program, I am seen stating that we don’t have a salinity crisis, but rather an ‘honesty crisis’.

Peter Cullen (a Director of the National Water Commission), Wendy Craik (head of Murray Darling Basin Commission), John Passioura (CSIRO) and others, are quoted in the clip suggesting the Murray River is not dying and that the problem of salinity may have been grossly overstated. The television reporter, Ross Coulthart, describes it as, “Misguided pessimism”.

To John Quiggin, who has relentlessly attacked me, and my credibility, over this issues, I say:

Maybe I was just a bit ahead of my time.

————————————-
Following is the media release from Channel 9:

Australia’s Salinity Crisis: What Crisis?

The SUNDAY Program
Nine Network Australia
Sunday 28th May 2006 – 9am

Reporter: Ross Coulthart
Producer: Nick Farrow

It’s an apocalyptic story of environmental disaster we all know so well.

The Murray Darling basin is being poisoned by salt. Adelaide’s water supply is threatened, along with some of our most productive farmland – and our beautiful rivers are dying.

It’s a frightening scenario. But is it true?

In this week’s SUNDAY programme, reporter Ross Coulthart takes a look at the real threat posed by salinity – and finds things are going badly wrong in public science.

As Coulthart reveals, some of the claims being used to support calls for billions of dollars to be spent on fixing a ‘looming salinity crisis’ are simply not true.

Salinity is a problem. But it seems nowhere as bad as we’ve been told by environmental groups, government departments and many in the media.

Claims that an area of land twice the size of Tasmania is under threat are false. The reality is a fraction of that. Even top scientists now admit the predictions of a disaster have been exaggerated.

They say this may be because the theory about what causes salinity in non-irrigation areas is flawed.

Worse still, scientists suggest a cheaper and easier solution for salinity problems is being ignored – for very unscientific reasons.

“It’s a disaster for science. It’s a disaster for farmers,” one former CSIRO scientist tells SUNDAY.

Taxpayers have now given Government scientists billions of dollars to spend on efforts to understand and tackle salinity. But how solid is the science behind it?

Watch the SUNDAY Program this Sunday 28th May at 9am to find out.”

And here’s the link to the video promo: http://www.nextgenmedia.com/nine/promo/sunday_060528_vid_300.asx

The report reiterates “salinity … as one of the most serious environmental issues in the Basin” and suggests that “stream salt loads” and “stream salinity” will increase. Part 1 of the report is 48 pages and Part 2 is 29 pages but there is only one graph of Murray River salinity and it was drawn in 1988, some 16 years ago. It is computer-model generated and interestingly begins in 1920 even though first recording were not made until 1938.

In my opinion it is both sad and deceitful that the CSIRO won’t show us what salinity levels really look like but instead keeps republishing a dated and misleading graph from a computer model.

Would you like to see what salt levels are really like?

Here’s a plot of yearly average stream salinity from when recordings where first made in 1938:

This graph is based on data that I recently requested and received from the Murray Darling Basin Commission.

A plot of all the daily readings for Morgan, a key site as its just upstream from the off-shoots for Adelaide’s water supply, also shows a downward trend for the last 20 years:

This data was also sourced from the Murray Darling Basin Commission and the last data point represents last Friday, 19th May 2006.

It’s good news that salt levels are falling. But no-one will acknowledge it!

A common ‘excuse’ given for the low stream salinity levels is that it’s been so dry, “It doesn’t rain so much in the Murray-Darling Basin anymore”. But hang-on, a plot of rainfall for the Murray-Darling Basin shows no recent drop-off. The last very dry year was 2002 and that wasn’t unusually dry in the scheme of things.

The graph is from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, click here.

Perhaps so much funding is dependent on the perception that salinity is a continuing problem, and so many reputations have been made on the myth, that there is almost an obligation to repeat the falsehood?

I reckon it matters that CSIRO and others keep misleading the Australian public on this issue. I reckon it matters that the federal government just announced another $500 million for the Murray River on the pretext that river salinity is a continuing problem.

* The reports are titled ‘The Shared Water Resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ by Kirby M et al. 2006 and ‘Risks to the Shared Water Resources of the Murray-Darling Basin’ by Van Dijk, A et al 2006 published by the Murray Darling Basin Commission, Canberra and prepared by CSIRO Land and Water as part of the Water for a Healthy Country National Flagship Program.

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This Sunday, Channel 9’s Sunday program is planning to feature at story on the Murray River and salinity. I’m hoping that Ross Coulthart from SUNDAY will go beyond the empty rhetoric and show that the emperor has no clothes.

So if you live in Australia, watch Channel 9 from 9am on Sunday.

I’ve written a bit about the Murray River which can be accessed online including an IPA backgrounder, click here, and something for Online Opinion more recently, click here, and for ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint with Michael Duffy, click here. I will in due course do a complete critique of the two-part CSIRO report.

Her research findings seem to focus on what the modelers said, without scrutinizing the extent to which what they said about the models, accorded with reality. In particular Myanna found that the modelers were very attached to their models and sometimes confused model output with reality. But it is unclear from her work how accurate the models were – the extent to which they did accord with reality?

Last time I looked I was impressed with the extent to which well known global warming scientist, James Hansen, was still on track with his 1988 prediction (Scenario B) about global temperature increase.

Then again between his Scenario A and C, he was covering a range of possibilities?

But hey, all predictions, made back in 1988, have been consistent with what has been a warming trend over the last 18 years.

In contrast, government scientists who made predictions about salinity along the Murray, in particular the NSW Riverina, got it really wrong.

The following graph shows what the models predicted would be the extent of the problem in the Riverina with, and without, a commitment to catchment and farm drainage plans.

The problem of rising groundwater in the NSW Riverina once seemed intractable. In 1990 123,300 hectares was considered at high risk of salinity because the water table was within two meters of the surface. At that time it was predicted that if the irrigators did nothing, by 2006 228,700 hectares would be lost to salt. If the irrigators committed to a $473 million program with $150 million from the state and federal governments, it was predicted that only 182,620 million hectares would be lost.

The irrigators committed to the program in the early 1990s including the implementation of drainage works often including water recycling systems to reduce recharge to the groundwater and improve water use efficiency.

The actual area now affected by shallow water tables is just 3,758 hectares – this is just two percent of the area that the NSW government thought would be affected under the most optimist scenario.

While I am pleased salt levels have been falling in the Murray River, and that the area at risk of salinity in the NSW Riverina has reduced to 2 percent of what was predicted, I am always amazed at how many people ignore this great news story.

Earlier this week the Australian Parliament’s Senate Environment Committee released a report about salinity. The report reads as though hardly anything has been achieved in address salinity in the Australian landscape.

The report recommends an extension of funding for the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality – a project that began in 2001 with a budget of $1.4 billion. It is unclear from the senate report how this $1.4 billion has been spent.

Senator Andrew Bartlett chaired the committee and has a blog piece on the report here.

The Senate report repeats the finding from the National Land and Water Audit’s Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000 that 17 million hectares of Australian farmland could be lost to dryland salinity by 2050.

Yet various recent reports have shown the 17 million hectare figure to be a gross exaggeration.

As Mick Keogh from the Australian Farm Institute recently explained:

“Increasingly, researchers are concluding that many of the assumptions and much of the data used in generating this estimate were wrong, or should not have been used. There are suggestions, for example, that some State salinity assessments used to calculate the national estimate overstate the current extent of salinity by factors of between three and seven times, let alone the projected future extent. Several of the state reports had no reliable data to base estimates on, and many made assumptions about future groundwater levels – a critical element in salinity assessments – that defy the laws of gravity and science, and are not supported by available data.”

At some point in time, the Australian community and the Australian Senate should accept that farmers have learnt how to manage salt. It hasn’t gone away, but the area affected by salinity is contracting and this is a great news story everyone should be shouting about.

But they are not.

And I am reminded of a comment posted at this blog about the same day the Senate released the report. While Geoff Sherrington made the comment in the context of global warming, it seems much more applicable to salinity modeling:

“Modelers would be prudent to keep their frameworks up to date, with periodic testing and private comparison with others, until consensus is reached that the methodology is scientifically good and all plausible effects are quantified.

Economists should not make predictions until that consensus is reached, unless they like eating humble pie.

If, in my earth sciences past, our company had announced a new ore deposit and given figures for its value to the Stock Exchange that was premature, we would well have ended up incarcerated.

If we got our maths wrong and mined a body that turned out a dud, we could go out of business and on the street. These outcomes instill a certain caution and accountability. Greenhouse modelers who produce premature estimates don’t have the same sword hanging over their heads. Their reward is more likely idolatry from supplicants.”

Certainly the doomsay salinity modelers have received nothing but praise, and the science managers who repeated their predictions promoted including to the National Water Commission, while I am often called all sort of nasty names at the popular blogs including at John Quiggin’s and Andrew Bartlett’s for daring to suggest they might have got their predictions very wrong.

Hello Jen,

We have all grown accustomed to the notion that it is the removal of trees from the landscape that causes salinity. But recent research from the Argentine Pampas indicates that the addition of trees to a natural grassland can also increase the salinity of groundwater flow systems (GFS).

This could have major implications for the management of salinity in the Murray Darling Basin, particularly in rangeland areas where major thickening events have taken place or where existing small clusters of forest have expanded onto grassland ecosystems.

The study, by Esteban G. Jobbagy and Robert B. Jackson, published in Global Change Biology compared 20 paired plots of forest and grassland and found a significant increase in groundwater salinity under the forested plots. “Afforested plots (10-100 ha in size) showed 4-19-fold increases in groundwater salinity on silty upland soils but less than twofold increases on clay loess soils and sand dunes.”

While this study has been limited to planted forest plots on previously grassland ecosystems, the same causal factors are at play whenever forest vegetation expands on grassland. And it logically follows that the same causal factors will be at play when, for example, a 10% canopy woodland thickens to become a 60% canopy forest.

Jobbagy & Jackson have concluded that “Soil cores and vertical electrical soundings indicated that …salts accumulated close to the water table and suggested that salinization resulted from the exclusion of fresh groundwater solutes by tree roots.”

To which the average farmer would say, “Well, they would do that, wouldn’t they”.

The extensive, 1400 plus, rangeland sample plots done by Bill Burrows confirm that more than 60 million hectares of rangeland in Queensland is subject to thickening at an average rate of circa 0.25m2 increase in basal area per hectare. There is a further estimated 30 million hectares in NSW. And there are also numerous landholder reports of properties that had only 3,000 ha of Gidgee in the early 1900’s but have in the order of 50,000 ha today as a result of major encroachment onto grassland.

And this poses an interesting question for the publicly funded anti-salinity industry and the policy arms that have focussed so much public attention on the removal of trees as salinity causal agent. If the lowering of a water table by excess bore irrigation can be widely recognised as a causal factor in increasingly brackish ground water resources, why has it taken so long to recognise that a similar lowering of a water table by the addition of trees can produce the same result?

It certainly invites the question, is there any similar research conducted here in Australia?

Clearly, the political exploitation of salinity appears to be sinking deeper and deeper into murkier water.

Regards,
Ian Mott