A climate-changed future – Australia’s marine heatwave disrupting ocean life
In the summer of 2017-18, the intense marine heatwave was combined with a land-based heatwave, together covering four million sq km. Scientists foundthe extreme weather event caused unprecedented loss of glacial ice in the New Zealand Southern Alps, changes to wine-grape harvests, and major disruption of marine ecosystems including kelp habitat loss, new species invasions and fisheries season changes.
This year the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand reported that sea surface temperatures in the Tasman were again above average.
Like coral reefs and tropical rainforests, the ocean suffers the slow torture of climate change peppered with high-intensity hits from extreme weather.
A window into the future
Marine heatwaves are generally out of sight and out of mind until one gets so bad it becomes impossible to ignore, says CSIRO research scientist Alistair Hobday.
A marine heatwave happens when the ocean temperature is much warmer than usual for the time of year from sunlight heating the surface water or warm water being brought via ocean currents – or both.
Climate change is causing marine heatwaves to happen more frequently and with more intensity. There may not be scorched earth or destroyed homes left in its wake, but a marine heatwave impacts our future in different ways – and serves as a warning. ……… https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/05/australias-marine-heatwaves-provide-a-glimpse-of-the-new-ecological-order
Drought wipes billions from Australian farm production
ABC Rural By national rural reporter Kath Sullivan 4 Mar 19.The value of all that is farmed in Australia has fallen to $58 billion, from $63.8 billion two years ago.
In its latest commodity report, released today, ABARES found improved commodity prices and the low Australian dollar had softened the decline, largely driven by drought.
“Drought in the eastern states significantly reduced the 2018–19 winter crop, but one of the largest Western Australian harvests on record has provided a buffer to the national total,” it said.
Livestock industries also contributed to the decline, with ABARES reporting the volume of livestock products dropped by 2 per cent this year.
“Milk and wool production have been affected by the drought, and a significant decline in live animal exports also contributed to the fall,” it said.
“This is largely because of cessation in live sheep exports during the northern hemisphere summer months.”
ABARES reported that floods in Queensland last month could further reduce the volume of live cattle exports…….. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-05/value-of-australian-farm-production-drops-abares-figures/10867294
Victoria’s major bushfires still out of control
Victoria bushfires: Major blazes still out of control as residents may be allowed to return home
By 9News Staff, 6:03am Mar 5, 2019 Five of the 29 bushfires burning in Victoria this morning are still out of control this morning stretching across 59,000 hectares of land.
A cooler weather change that is moving over the state has seen yesterday’s ‘Emergency’ warning zones downgraded to a ‘Watch and Act’ level, however authorities have warned that four major fires are still out of control.
Those incidents include the largest blaze still raging in Victoria at the Bunyip State Park which is still sparking spot fires in multiple areas…….https://www.9news.com.au/2019/03/04/18/10/news-melbourne-bushfires-bangholme-dandenong-south-fire
Long delayed realisation of Australia’s brutal history of massacres of Aboriginal people
As the toll of Australia’s frontier brutality keeps climbing, truth telling is long overdue, The myth of benign, peaceful settlement persists today – even as historians reveal a far more sinister picture
• The Killing Times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Australia must confront
• A massacre map of the frontier wars – interactive
Guardian by Paul Daley, 4 Mar 19
“………… The Australian Museum estimates that pre-European invasion in 1788, about 750,000 Indigenous people (representing some 700 language groups) inhabited the continent that would become Australia. This figure may well be an underestimate.
Little over a century later, by federation in 1901, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island population had diminished to some 117,000. Black-white warfare and organised massacres, no matter how you define them, with police, British soldiers, native police, militia and raiding parties as the perpetrators, accounted for many tens of thousands of deaths. Individual acts of violence – including shootings, poisonings, torture and illegal incarceration – killed many more. Battle wounds, starvation (owing to the depletion of traditional hunting grounds) and disease – all of which can also be directly linked to invasion and frontier conflict – killed countless others.
Yet the historiographic confect of benign, peaceful settlement and the unexplained “passing” or “extinction” of the “natives” pervaded well into the 1960s, replete with the deception that very few Aboriginal people died violently during pastoral and urban expansion and dispossession. Things began to change with the emergence of a new, more inquisitive, less empire-centric cohort of historians and writers who, not content with the Anglophile colonial trope of terra nullius and benevolence to the Indigenes, began to commit truth to the page………..
In the 1970s and 1980s a number of historians – among them Henry Reynolds, Marilyn Lake and Richard Broome – began focusing on frontier violence, using the colonial records, newspaper archives and family histories (including generational oral accounts of killings).
Reynolds is acknowledged as the first Australian historian to make a calculated continental estimate of the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who died violently in Australian frontier conflict. In his 1981 book, The Other Side of the Frontier, and after at least a decade’s research Reynolds estimated the figure at about 20,000……….
Reynolds speaks of the significance of Evans and Ørsted-Jensen’s research on the numbers of killings in colonial Queensland.
Based on an extrapolation of native police documentation, they estimated (conservatively) that as many as 60,000 Aboriginal people died in frontier violence in Queensland alone.
The national implications of the figure are profound; the wars that raged across this continent from 1788 did, it seem, claim more Indigenous lives than 62,000 Australian service personnel who died in the first world war………… https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/04/as-the-toll-of-australias-frontier-brutality-keeps-climbing-truth-telling-is-long-overdue
Over 2000 firefighters working to contain bushfires around Victoria
Fires rip through Victoria: ‘worse than Black Saturday’, A fire, which has destroyed properties and more than 10,000 hectares of land is burning in the same area as the deadly Black Saturday bushfires. Bushfires have ripped through Victoria’s east, with a wind change challenging firefighters working all night to contain the blaze. SBS News 4 Mar 19
Despite cooler conditions expected on Monday, firefighters may have to contend with dry lightning, which could start more fires.
The Bunyip State Park fire, burning 65km east of Melbourne, was sparked by lightning strikes on Friday and has destroyed more than 10,000 hectares.
The blaze is still racing towards the Princes Freeway and emergency warnings remain in place for the surrounding area.
“The risk of lightning redevelops in the late morning with the chance of some showers and thunderstorms,” Bureau of Meteorology’s senior forecaster Christie Johnson said.
While there was a chance of showers, it was hard to pinpoint where they would hit, and there would only be a few millimetres of rainfall, she said…..
More than 2000 firefighters are working to contain blazes around the state …..https://www.sbs.com.au/news/fires-rip-through-victoria-worse-than-black-saturday
Australia’s Energy Minister, Angus Taylor, lying about Australia’s greenhouse emissions
Angus Taylor again falsely claims Australia’s greenhouse emissions are falling, Guardian, Amy RemeikisIn an interview with the ABC program Insiders, Angus Taylor repeatedly stated emissions had decreased by 1% repeating the line first said by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, that Australia would meet its Paris commitments in “a canter”……. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/03/angus-taylor-again-falsely-claims-australias-greenhouse-emissions-are-falling
How bushfires generate their own weather
Why Victoria’s bushfires generated their own lightning, The Age , By Liam Mannix, March 4, 2019 — There are few sights more terrifying for a firefighter: a vast, dark storm cloud brewing above a bushfire, shooting out lightning.
On Sunday, the Licola bushfire east of Melbourne burned with such intensity it generated a huge thundercloud that fired hundreds of lightning strikes at nearby forests.
The Bunyip fire, which is believed to have wiped at least one town off the map, also generated its own weather system which fed the fire with extreme winds.
“It’s absolutely terrifying. And it’s dangerous as well, because that lightning can start new fires before the main fire,” says Dean Narramore, a meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology’s extreme weather desk.
How bushfires generate their own weather
As a bushfire burns, it generates hot, smoke-filled air.
This air is hotter than surrounding air and rapidly rises, forming a smoke plume.
As the plume rises, atmospheric pressure falls. This causes the plume to spread out, generating a “mushroom” on top of the plume.
The smoke plume is filled with moisture which is released by burning trees. The higher you go in the atmosphere, the cooler it gets, so the top parts of the plume get chilled.
This causes the moisture in the plume to condense (turn from water vapour into tiny water droplets) and form a cloud.
As the plume rises rapidly into the sky, cool air is sucked in to replace it. This causes extreme winds near the firefront. To fight a fire, you need to know which way it is burning. But when a fire-cloud forms and starts generating strong and unpredictable winds, the fire can become chaotic.
“All this air rushes into the fire. You can imagine air coming from all different angles, feeding in – and oxygen is a very important part of fire. It causes fires to race up and down hills,” Mr Narramore says…….. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/why-victoria-s-bushfires-generated-their-own-lightning-20190304-p511kd.html
Climate crisis – heating oceans affecting Tasman Sea marine life, and seafood industries
‘Not very happy’: Tasman Sea warmth puts the heat on key fisheries, Brisbane Times, By Peter Hannam, March 2, 2019 Back-to-back summer heatwaves in the Tasman Sea that have affected marine life and seafood industries in Australia and New Zealand could be another sign of the warming climate, scientists say.
Australia has just had its warmest summer by far, with the role of so-called blocking highs in the Tasman seen by meteorologists as key to the build-up of record-breaking heat over the country’s south-east.
The still conditions brought by those highs have the effect of limiting ocean mixing, while the relatively cloudless skies allowed solar radiation to warm the waters of the Tasman to a greater-than-usual depth.
By the Bureau of Meteorology’s definition, a marine heatwave occurs when temperatures in the top 10 per cent of readings for that time of year exist for at least five days. The Tasman Sea has met the definition for months on end, two years in a row………
The effect on marine ecosystems, fishing and aquaculture industries “can be devastating, including killing off kelp forests and corals”……… https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/weather/not-very-happy-tasman-sea-warmth-puts-the-heat-on-key-fisheries-20190302-p511cr.html
New South Wales election – 3 Independent MP’s gather strength for climate action
NSW election roundup: independents join forces on climate changeThree possible kingmakers write to premier and opposition leader. Plus: the key promises made this week , Guardian, Josephine ToveyPolls have consistently suggested the main parties are locked in a dead heat, and a Coalition minority government is widely regarded as a likely outcome of the 23 March election.
Greenwich said that whatever the outcome, he would work with either of the major parties to deliver his priorities, with a strong focus on climate change and homelessness……. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/02/nsw-election-roundup-independents-join-forces-on-climate
Unique to Australia – the use of climate funding for upgrading COAL -FIRED plants !!
Green finance experts say Australia is out of step with World Bank, Europe and the US, which are using funding to combat global warming
Australia is the only developed country that allows climate change funding to be used to upgrade coal-fired power plants, green finance experts say.
Experts say allowing Vales Point coal-fired power station to register with the Morrison government’s emissions reduction fund, rebadged this week as a “climate solutions” policy, puts Australia out of step with the World Bank, Europe and the US, which have all rejected using climate financing for coal power retrofits.
The World Bank has issued US$13bn in green bonds since 2008 to stimulate spending to combat global warming.
China has used green bonds to help build new coal-fired plants to replace older, dirtier stations on the grounds it reduces nitrogen-based emissions causing the country’s oppressive air pollution. But it announced in Decemberit would no longer consider “clean coal” plants – which still emit significant amounts of greenhouse gas – investments in green technology.
Sean Kidney, chief executive of the London-based Climate Bonds Initiative, says China’s shift leaves Australia out on its own.
“If you were committed to meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which the Australian government says it is committed to, this is just lunacy,” Kidney says.
“No investors in the western world will accept any green bonds that incentivise anything like coal station retrofits. From an investor’s perspective, coal is a dead duck.”
Emma Herd, chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, says Australia is moving across the trend by considering giving taxpayer support to coal. In addition to the potential support through the climate solutions fund, the government is considering underwriting the cost of building new coal-fired power stations.
In the past fortnight, mining giant Glencore has said it will cap coal production in response to pressure from shareholders, while Rio Tinto stressed it was the only large mining company with no fossil fuel investments, having sold its final coal assets to Glencore last year……..
Even if Vales Point is not successful, critics such as the Australian Conservation Foundation say there is nothing preventing other coal-fired plant owners from applying for a climate subsidy. Major companies are being paid from the fund for other fossil fuel projects: South African miner Gold Fields is getting $1m for a gas-fired plant the company says it would have built regardless; Rio Tinto has received $2m for a diesel-fired power plant at a bauxite mine.
With prime minister Scott Morrison announcing the Coalition would top up the $2.55bn fund with an additional $2bn over a decade, economists and environmentalists have called for emissions from fossil fuels to be dealt with through different policies and for the fund to focus on projects that restore or protect natural habitat……..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/01/out-on-its-own-australia-the-only-country-to-use-climate-funding-to-upgrade-coal-fired-plants
Three people treated at Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear facility after chemical spill
Three staff at the Lucas Heights nuclear facility have been decontaminated after being exposed to a chemical spill.
Key points:
- Australia’s only nuclear reactor is located at Lucas Heights, about 40km south of Sydney’s CBD
- Two men and a women were decontaminated and taken to Sutherland Hospital
- The facility has had several contamination scares in recent years
A spokesman for Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) said the workers were exposed to sodium hydroxide when a cap came off a pipe in the nuclear medicine manufacturing building…………
Contamination scares
The Lucas Heights facility, about 40 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD, has had several contamination scares in recent years.
In August 2017 a worker suffered blisters on his hands after he dropped a vial of radioactive material and was contaminated through two pairs of gloves.
The event was deemed the most serious in the world in 2017, according to the International Nuclear Event Scale — the global grading system for nuclear incidents.
ANSTO apologised to the worker who was exposed to the radioactive material and produced an “action plan”, in response.
An independent review of the facility was conducted in October 2018 and found that it failed modern nuclear safety standards and should be replaced.
In the same week ANSTO confirmed five workers had received a dose of radiation at the facility, but that the amount of radiation was “less than a chest X-ray”.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-01/three-treated-after-safety-breach-at-sydney-nuclear-facility/10860708
Matt Canavan, Minister for Resources (not very bright) , got very flustered about nuclear waste dump safety issues
Economics Part 3 NRWMF 20190221
I did enjoy watching Australia’s not very bright Minister for Resources, Matt Canavan, floundering about as he tries to cover up his ignorance of the subject! I did enjoy Matt Canavan triyng hard to shut up Senator Rex Patrick with his inconvenient questions about risks of nuclear waste – risks explained by Dept of Defence!Hansard extract of Estimates Hearing on 21 February 2019 radioactive waste. [20:46]
Senator Canavan :….. we do have the uncertainty of a court case at the moment, the government hasn’t made any decision around future steps to test support for a radioactive waste facility at Kimba or Hawker. ……
the Commonwealth in the selection process? I note that both of those sites were recommended as a possibility in this very extensive report.Senator CANAVAN: hang on, Senator—our security. You’re running a political campaign on a local community issue, but now you’re trying to bring in security issues unannounced, unaired. I don’t think that is appropriate behaviour. …… http://www.mossmusic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Hansard-extract-of-Estimates-Hearing-21_2_19.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0RVyvtH_U2Csq0XvSfz4sV1oDJTLC9dbwhXrOO-YEfSzEyRf0GBw07mQs
Friends of the Earth congratulates “The Advertiser” on its coverage of the safety dangers of Kimba nuclear waste dump plan
Jim Green shared a link. Nuclear Fuel Cycle Watch South Australia Unpublished letter to The Advertiser … Congratulations to The Advertiser for exposing the terrorist risks associated with Canberra’s plan to establish a national nuclear waste dump in SA. The government’s claim that the dump would pose “no security or safety risk to the community” is contradicted by the plan to station 14 security and safeguards officers at the site.The nuclear dump would be subject to aircraft strikes and intrusions. It would also be a target for terrorists removing 
drums to make a radioactive “dirty bomb” ‒ risks that have previously been flagged by nuclear engineers Alan Parkinson and John Large:
”If terrorists can raid a nuclear waste repository or store and steal radioactive material,” Mr Parkinson said, “they can easily spread it by conventional explosives.”
Nuclear terrorist hazards also apply to nuclear waste transportation. In 2006, a reporter succeeded in planting a fake bomb on a train carrying nuclear waste in north-west London.
A NSW Parliamentary Inquiry found there “is no doubt that the transportation of radioactive waste increases the risk of accident or incident – including some form of terrorist intervention”.
Premier Steven Marshall did himself proud by standing up against the dangerous plan to turn SA into the world’s nuclear waste dump. Will the Premier now stand up to Canberra and oppose the plan to turn SA into the nation’s nuclear waste dump?
Jim Green, Friends of the Earth https://www.facebook.com/groups/1021186047913052/
Minister Canavan incorrect in saying that terrorism risks had not been raised.
Olympic Dam Major Development Declaration
Olympic Dam Major Development Declaration, Friends of the Earth 28 Feb 19. The South Australian Minister for Planning has declared that a proposal by BHP Ltd to expand the operations of the Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine, located 550 km NNW of Adelaide, shall constitute a Major Development under section 46 of the Development Act 1993.The proposal covers the expansion of mining and processing activities at Olympic Dam, including an additional take of water from the Great Artesian Basin. It allows for an increase in copper production from 200,000 tpa Cu and associated products to up to 350,000 tpa Cu and associated products, as well as new and/or expanded facilities to support the development.
The declaration of a Major Development takes the project outside the bounds of the usual development assessment process. The type of assessment and reporting required for this project has yet to be decided by the State Planning Commission and Minister for Energy and Mining. That decision will determine the degree of public consultation on offer, which this eBulletin will endeavor to report as soon as possible.
1 This month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
20 May – Webinar – The dangerous world of AUKUS, US, military occupation and suppression of dissent
National Webinar, 20th May, 2026, 6.30pm AEST. Confronting laws restricting/suppressing protest speech and action
Speakers: Former Sen. Rex Patrick, Lawyer Nick Hanna ,Arthur Rorris ,Jorgen Doyle, Sen David Shoebbridge,
Facilitator Kelley Tranter.
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 