Australia’s Opposition leaders not interested in global warming. Abbott too busy fighting fires
Blaming climate change for heatwave ‘simplistic’, The Age January 10,
2013 Judith Ireland ACTING Opposition Leader Warren Truss says it is
”too simplistic” to link the current heatwave and fires to climate
change……
Earlier this week, when touring fire-affected areas of
Tasmania, Prime Minister Julia Gillard linked extreme weather events
to climate change. She said: ”While you would not put any one event
down to climate change … we do know that over time as a result of
climate change we are going to see more extreme-weather events.”
As Fairfax Media reported on Wednesday, the Bureau of Meteorology says
this heatwave – in terms of its duration, intensity and extent – is
unprecedented in its records.
Mr Truss is acting Opposition Leader as Tony Abbott has been deployed
to Nowra, New South Wales, as a volunteer with his local fire brigade.
Mr Abbott has delayed his annual holiday by three days to help the
Davidson Rural Fire Brigade. :
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/blaming-climate-change-for-heatwave-simplistic-20130109-2cgug.html#ixzz2HbICnoMZ
In the minds of the nuclear scientists – a revealing book – “Brighter than a Thousand Suns”
Character before knowledge, Online Opinion, by Noel Wauchope 10 Jan 13, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, by Robert Jungk, was first published in 1956. “Why are we interested only in what scientists do, and not in what they are? ” This opening question informs Jungk’s entire book. Jungk conversed with many of the scientists of the early days of atomic research, and through until 1954. With the earliest conversations, Jungk was struck by “the arbitrary and unnatural separation of scientific research from the reality of the individual personality”. To Jungk, it was this division that “allowed the creation of such monstrosities as the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb”.
To this day, many nuclear scientists think of their work as purely mathematical and technical. The human results of nuclear weapons are none of their business. Others, especially after Hiroshima, suffered “their great crisis of conscience”……..
From then on, it was a rush to test the bomb, and then use it, before the Japanese surrendered. Three atomic bombs were built. The first – tested: if the test was a failure – it would be reported as a “girl” – if successful a “boy”.
For the second and third bombs, 67 Scientists petitioned the government to warn the Japanese first – a petition that was prevented by General Groves from reaching the White House. Enrico Fermi commented “Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples! After all, the thing is superb physics!”
The $2 billion Manhattan Project would be seen as a senseless waste of money, if Japan surrendered. Truman authorised the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer explained later that his Interim Committee’s recommendation was “a technical opinion”.
The reactions of the scientists were conflicted……
Robert Jungk’s account of the men, and some women, too, who developed atomic weapons , is set against the background of the big events of the time, with a sympathetic attitude to the pressures and problems that surrounded these people.
From 1951 to 1955 the general attitude of atomic scientists was one of enthusiasm for the hydrogen bomb (1000 times more powerful than the first atomic bomb). Jungk muses on this: “How is one to explain such macabre enthusiasm which had swept away all the earlier scruples and objections to the Super monster?” http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14554
Nuclear power and fossil fuels have much greater impact on birds, than wind turbines do
The Avian and Wildlife Costs of Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power
“…Within the uncertainties of the data used, the estimate means that wind farm-related avian fatalities equated to approximately 46,000 birds in the United States in 2009, but nuclear power plants killed about 460,000 and fossil-fueled power plants 24 million…”
Benjamin K. Sovacool Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy – Centre on Asia and Globalisation June 30, 2012 Abstract:
Environmentalists and environmental scientists have criticized wind energy in various forums for its negative impacts on wildlife, especially birds. This article highlights that nuclear power and fossil-fuelled power systems have a host of environmental and wildlife costs as well, particularly for birds.
Therefore, as a low-emission, low-pollution energy source, the wider use of wind energy can save wildlife and birds as it displaces these more harmful sources of electricity. The paper provides two examples: one relates to a calculation of avian fatalities across wind electricity, fossil-fueled, and nuclear power systems in the entire United States.
It estimates that wind farms are responsible for roughly 0.27 avian fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while nuclear power plants involve 0.6 fatalities per GWh and fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 9.4 fatalities per GWh. Within the uncertainties of the data used, the estimate means that wind farm-related avian fatalities equated to approximately 46,000 birds in the United States in 2009, but nuclear power plants killed about 460,000 and fossil-fueled power plants 24 million.
A second example summarizes the wildlife benefits from a 580-MW wind farm at Altamont Pass in California, a facility that some have criticized for its impact on wildlife. The paper lastly highlights other social and environmental benefits to wind farms compared to other sources of electricity and energy. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2198024_code1250463.pdf?abstractid=2198024&mirid=1
Nuclear submarine crew regularly got “drunk out of their minds”
Police alarm at ‘routine’ binge-drinking on nuclear submarine where
murdered shot officer, Telegraph, 9 Jan 13
Police investigating a naval rating who shot dead an officer onboard a
submarine found the 20 pints he consumed beforehand was not unsual and
“significant” numbers of the crew used to get “drunk out of their
minds”. Continue reading
Scary facts on Australians, UV radiation, and skin cancer
“Forgetting to cover up is simply scary when you think about the 115
South Australians who die from melanoma skin cancer every year.”
but each time you burn, the UV
radiation causes damage to the DNA in your skin and as you get older
your body’s ability to kill those damaged cells is scaled back.”
Skin cancer message not getting through Health reporter Jordanna
Schriever Adelaide Now, The Advertiser January 09, 2013 SOUTH
Australians are being sloppy when it comes to avoiding sunburn.
SA Health latest figures to the end of November show 33 people were
treated in hospital for sunburn and 17 for sunstroke.
Of the total, 11 were children and, in all but one case, the children
were admitted because of sunburn.
Cancer Council SA chief executive Brenda Wilson said she was deeply
concerned by any sunburn-related hospital admissions because of the
avoidable, long-term health consequences. Continue reading
Aboriginal culture shows that there are alternate ways to live
the visionary realm of the Aborigines represents one of the great experiments in human thought
The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond – review Should we look to traditional societies to help us tweak our lives? Wade Davis takes issue with the whole idea The Guardian, 9 January 2013 “……The goal of the anthropologist is not just to decipher the exotic other, but also to embrace the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, that we might enrich our understanding of human nature and just possibly liberate ourselves from cultural myopia, the parochial tyranny that has haunted humanity since the birth of memory……
Studies of the human genome leave no doubt that the genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. Race is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some 2,500 generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.
It follows, as Boas believed, that all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. …..
The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilised, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited – indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial notion that it was, as relevant to our lives today as the belief of 19th-century clergymen that the Earth was but 6,000 years old….. Continue reading
Kimberley gas hub an election issue – Compulsory Acquisition pressure on Aboriginal people
The Barnett/Grylls government’s act of Compulsory Acquisition…is simply another episode in the dispossession of
Aboriginal people. Compulsory acquisition can never promote nor lead
to self-determination. By no measure was the James Price Point Native
Title Agreement made with ‘free, prior and informed consent’,
consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples.
The Greens say that it is morally wrong to use Compulsory Acquisition
to pressure native title holders to trade their country for services
and benefits that are entitlements of citizenship…….
Greens Candidate Chris Maher says the proposed Kimberley gas hub is
the central election issue this year. Kimberley Page, 10 Jan 13,
“But the election will be about more than just the gas hub; it will be
about a vision for the future of the Kimberley,” Mr Maher said. Chris
Maher
The Greens Candidate for the Kimberley. 8 January 2013 The central
issue for the Kimberley in this year’s WA State Election is the
proposed LNG processing factory at James Price Point, just north of
Broome Continue reading
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 