When the grass is tall and unruly, it can be difficult to see where you are going and to know what lies beneath.
Then come the steady, gradual, crawling and crackling fires.
New growth follows. Suddenly the kangaroo and emu are back, for the tender shoots. What appeared to be destruction, was just the beginning of a new cycle.
That is how it is sometimes, where I grew-up at Coomalie of the stoney country in the Northern Territory of Australia. My country.
Fire can create a balance between trees and grasses in the savanna, not just at Coomalie, but around the world. We need to know this if we are to understand nature, and how natural environments can change. Not just on land, but also under the sea.
If we are to understand what can follow coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef; how there can suddenly be an abundance of juvenile barracuda, and juvenile bream shoaling, and schooling. They were at Barron Rock Reef the Sunday before last in the tens of thousands above all the dead coral from the bleaching.
Visit these environments and listen, sometimes in discomfort, to know how this change happens. And you might also hear the whales.
There are the annual cycles of whale migration corresponding with the duration of Earth’s orbit around the Sun and then there are the longer cycles including Saturn-return. Of course, there are other cycles, daily-cycles, monthly-cycles and even cycles that caused the 120-metre sea level rise. That was 16,000 years ago, and every few hundred thousand years before that.
To know the long and deep history of our Earth – that is the story of climate change.
And yet they deny it. The elite are demanding that we deny it. To cancel those with a sceptical disposition who remember the cycles, not just from the left of politics, but now also from the right.
Did you know that Saturn can affect the Earth’s climate because it contributes to the ever-changing barycentre of our solar system. The thirty-year Saturn-return cycle is sometimes used as a metaphor for the three stages in the human lifecycle. But it is rare to hear about such things nowadays – about natural lifecycles. There are those who repeat ‘the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice’ while denying the existence of the natural cycles within this same universe.
The gravitational impact of Saturn and even the Moon are real, but more usually ignored. They are denied as though the sea tides do not even exist and that everything must be improved.
More usually the chosen faux scientists want to just add a number to something claiming the trend is either decreasing or increasing – apparently forever. It is rare to hear mention of natural cycles, even natural climate cycles.
Reference to a single number apparently makes it truer. That is his propaganda, the anointed one. Bjorn Lomborg mentions these types of single numbers in his latest YouTube being promoted by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) and with 50,000 views after just four days.
On their behalf, he concludes that everything is getting better – this is the ‘better story’. It is a line this side of politics is going to push very hard over the next few years. And I ask that you reject it. As I ask that you reject the idea that coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef can be reduced to a single number based on a perimeter survey while ignoring the schooling barracuda.
Oh so many fish shoaling and schooling one Sunday, as the coral collapsed beneath them.
While he claims that there is record coral cover. And they send me emails, endlessly promoting him. The most recent begins:
Bjorn Lomborg seeks to bring a balanced and thoughtful view to the climate conversation, where alarmist narratives have created policies that do more harm than good. We’ve been told emphatically by the New York Times that we live in a world on fire. The reality? The percentage of the global surface that wildfires burn each year has been steadily decreasing over the past century.
Why?
Human ingenuity.
I clicked across to the presentation and Lomborg’s first slide, on behalf of ARC, it declares:
Global Warming – Real and Manmade.
In fact, climate change is real, and part of a natural cycle within a cycle, within a cycle and the arc of the moral universe demand that he begin with this truth.
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The feature image (very top) is of Yellowback Puller (Chromis nitida) fishes schooling above dead coral at Bald Rock Reef the Sunday before last. And just above is me, in the Northern Territory of Australia beside a fire.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Science doesn’t play favourites.
Natural Cycles don’t play favourites.
Science Funding plays favourites.
If you want answers, follow the fossil fuel money.
Hi Karen
You are so naive. If there was ever any ‘fossil fuel money’ that was perhaps two decades ago.
More recently, at least since Malcolm Turnbull was PM of Australia, the money has been with those promoting ‘renewables’, vast sums.
Now the ‘right of politics’ has given up completely on ‘fossil fuels’ and is looking to promote nuclear, that is not a ‘fossil fuel’, but I don’t think they are getting much ‘nuclear money’.
The big money, including to fund Bjorn Lomborg’s think tank, is now from Bill Gates and others, including through the Seattle-based Gates Foundation. They have so much money to give away, and they have an agenda.
If you want to get up to date consider reading, ‘The Bill Gates Problem’ by Tim Schwab.
If you want to understand some of the history of how the corporate bullies came to have so much power and influence maybe begin with Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, ‘The Downing Street Years’.
I appreciate you commenting here, but you need to get yourself at least a little bit up-to-date.
Cheers, Jennifer
In the field of keeping track of causes of death, a new category needs to be added:
Deaths due to power grids made less reliable by closing reliable power generation that is replaced by intermittent, unreliable power and spending on adding wind, solar and battery farms and lack of spending on maintaining the power lines, replacing old poles and trimming trees.
In a lot of cases, heat and cold deaths are due to power outages, Those are power outage deaths, the heat or cold was caused by the power outages.
The power grid will need fossil fuel backup and people and businesses will need their own Tri-fuel Generators and a store of various fuels.
A large number of people I know have emergency generators who did not have them four years ago. I went to buy propane at a hardware store during our last power outage and I was amazed at how many people with multiple propane tanks each were in line ahead of and then behind me.
During the Texas Freeze, February 2021, water was off in my local water district and in Houston, major hospitals were without water because there was not enough Green Energy to Pump Water, because there was not enough Energy to Pump Natural Gas. There was Natural Gas at my house but not at some Natural Gas Power Plants.
In my 80 years, I have spent a huge amount of money on fossil fuels, I am thankful because the benefits were worth the cost.
I am also thankful for the improved battery life of many of my devices.
I am not thankful for local power grids with nuclear and fossil fuel being closed and replaced by Green Energy from far away and not even from Natural Gas from far away that is not stored locally. Local power generation and regional grids can be reasonably protected and power can be shared with other regional grids when available. Large, multi-regional grids are easily made unstable, by man or nature, even software hacks.
Thinking that Green Energy will ever influence the overall climate of Earth is Very Foolish and Very Evil, promoted by Very Evil People and accepted by Very Foolish People.
A lot of people will not change their mind even when presented with overwhelming evidence. Such adherence to belief and ideology poisons any intellectual flexibility. Money speaks .
If half a century after the last earth-shattering atomic blast shook the Pacific atoll of Bikini, the corals are flourishing again, surely fossil fuel can’t do too much damage. Just saying!
It is true that the Australian bush is well adapted to fire, in fact some native plants flourish after fires. However, as with climate change, man has interfered. The spread of non-indigenous weeds has resulted in them growing faster than the native bush and “choking” recovery of native plants. Also, these weeds have changed the fire profile which can negatively impact seed banks.
I would encourage your readers to have a look at, “Australia’s Megafires: Biodiversity Impacts and Lessons from 2019-2020” – edited by Libby Rumpff, Sarah M. Legge, Stephen van Leeuwen, Brendan A. Wintle, John C.Z. Woinarski.
“At least transiently, recently burnt areas may provide suitable conditions favouring some weed species, through flushes of nutrients, reduced competition with native species and increased light, and spread of weeds may then suppress post-fire recovery of native plants. Weed impacts after fire may be especially pronounced at or near modified environments. In some cases, weeds may increase fire severity; invasive grasses may trigger changes in fire regimes and transform ecosystems. Post-fire germination of weeds may deplete their soil seed bank, providing a time-bound opportunity to then implement effective management.”
“Starting in 1989, corporations with strong ties to the production and use of fossil fuels, in coordination with allied trade associations, conservative think tanks, philanthropic foundations, and public relations firms, mounted campaigns opposed to action to mitigate carbon emissions. A crucial strategy of this climate change counter-movement (CCCM) was the implementation of well-organized efforts to undermine public understanding of human-caused climate change by promoting uncertainty over mainstream climate science. These long-term efforts, often led by front groups to hide corporate responsibility, enlisted contrarian scientists for credibility and public relations firms for expertise in messaging. The misinformation developed by the CCCM has been greatly amplified by conservative media (especially Fox News, WSJ and talk radio), bloggers, and social media – as well as the Republican Party in the US, which has institutionalized climate change denial. This chapter reviews the major sources and amplifiers of climate change misinformation over the past three decades.”
Chapter 6: Sources and amplifiers of climate change denial
Riley E Dunlap and Robert J Brulle
Published: 08 Dec 2020
Collection: Social and Political Science 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789900408.00013
Ah, here we go again. The tired old argument about ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ species and complaints about ‘weeds’. It may come as a surprise to some but all species came from somewhere else. Whichever might have been the ‘first’ has been lost hundreds of millions of years ago. Migration is part of the natural cycle of evolution and climate changes. Instead of complaining about man’s interference – presumably we brought the offending weeds – why not complain about the ‘invasive’ species that arrive on driftwood or deposited by migrating birds? Surely they should be stopped to preserve ‘native’ species for eternity? There are no weeds in nature, only plants. Mankind defines weeds as plants that interfere with our agriculture and gardens and that is absolutely fine for our purposes but that does not make them bad per se.
The same thing applies to humans and any modern day tribe or group that claims to be ‘indigenous or ‘first nation’ is being disingenuous as they will have at one time been the invader and pushed out their predecessor. Whilst there may be some remote locations where the current inhabitants are direct descendants of literally the first humans to arrive that will be an exception and even then we cannot be sure that they were really the first. Descendants of the first humans to arrive in North America, probably from Siberia during the last glacial maximum migrating across the Bering ice bridge, are thought (from DNA studies) to be now living in Tierra Del Fuego having been pushed out by later waves of migration including those much later arrivals who now claim to be indigenous. Future research may discover a different story, or at least several more twists and turns. But history, recorded or derived from archaeology, shows how human migration is no different to the rest of nature. It is noticeable how the green lobby complain bitterly about ‘human interference’ but are quite prepared to promote their own interference that is then justified as ‘correcting’ previous interference. Who knows what the consequence of that correction might be? But of course, the green lobby ‘know best’, just as they know best to destroy an ancient woodland in Germany in order to build a forest of wind turbines, or remove hundreds of square kilometres of forest in Indonesia in order to obtain the rare metals to build those turbines. Blatant hypocrisy is ok if one is part of the global warming consensus.
One has to be very carefully making claims about biology and the rest of nature by relying on speculation and presenting opinion as fact – as is so common with the misleadingly named ‘fact checkers’ so beloved of the media (BBC, Guardian, Facebook, Google et. al.) which are no more than sites set up to peddle a particular ideology. This form of brainwashing is rife in the climate industry but not only, it pervades all walks of life and many are far too easily taken in. Having different opinions and being allowed to present them even if it upsets someone else, rather than being censored or hiding one’s opinions for fear of being vilified as happens all too often, is one of the hallmarks of liberty and free speech and we give in and allow that to happen at our peril. Constantly promoting opinions as fact, even in the face of strong counter-arguments and refusing to even entertain the possibility of being wrong, is not very helpful.
The constant bleating about oil company funding this or that wears very thin. Firstly, any person or company in a free society is entitled to use their money as they best see fit – save for obviously criminal activity – and a whole variety of activities are funded, and some are indeed more wholesome than others. Secondly, the amount of money going into the green lobby is a fifty or hundred times (or even more) that which oil companies spend on climate research or funding of so-called ‘deniers’. So where are the complaints about the green funding, many of whose recipients have been found guilty of criminal activity and in some cases even claimed it is justified ‘to save the planet’? One law for the consensus, another for the rest of us. Would be tyrants claim or act as if they are above the law, law-abiding citizens do not if at all possible, and if there are laws that clearly are unreasonable, or having unforeseen negative consequences, try to change them through logical argument and the electoral process however imperfect or difficult that may be.
@Peter Etherington-Smith I suggest you read up on biodiversity.