Global Warming - a personal view

(this is a copy of a message I wrote today to a local yahoo group, since I actually wrote something I think I should use it as much as possible!)

I’ve been reading, listening and thinking about our own personal situation wrt to bushfires as we live in Selby near the top of a north facing hill. Not the best place to be on a total fire ban day with a strong north wind!

I am an fan of the radio program Late Night Live but am usually a week or so behind (I’m a “poddy” not a “glady”). Last Wendesday (22nd july) Philip Adams had Robert Manne and Frank Campbell as guests in a discussion titled “Black Saturday: Bushfire strategy in ruins”.

The two guests are both of the view that the CFA, Police and others failed badly and that the whole idea of leave early or stay and defend is outdated and dangerous. I found the discussion to be quite good but left me feeling uneasy and not really agreeing with them. The two things that worried me most were:

• it seemed to be a case of 20/20 hindsight
• There was no real conclusion. If you don’t leave early or stay and defend, what do you do?

They made the point that there were warnings of how bad the conditions were going to be, but I feel that we get those sort of “dire” warnings all summer. Which do you believe and which not? Do you leave home every time there is going to be a total fire ban day? If I thought I needed to do that then I shouldn’t be living there in the first place. (there were 9, 8, 10, 11 and 10 TFB days for the 2003-2004 to 2007-2008 seasons)

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2009/2632244.htm

I’ve also been reading Paul Collins’ excellent book “Burn” over the past few weeks. Highly recommended if you haven’t already read it.

http://www.angusrobertson.com.au/book/burn-the-epic-story-of-the-bushfire-in-australia/5786997/

Other things I have been reading about and looking at are bushfire sprinkler systems for the house and fire bunkers but more on that later.

The first time I visited England was 1978. I can’t remember what it was I was buying from some shop in London, but I told the bloke serving me that I didn’t need a bag.

He looked at me as though I’d grown a second head.

I shrugged. ‘Save a tree,’ I said.

‘They’re plastic,’ he said.

‘Save some, uh, petrol, then,’ I said.

I checked to see if I had grown a second head, on account of the way he was looking at me. I took whatever thing it was that he’d sold me and put it into my handbag.

Why in hell did I need another bag? In the past thirty one years I have had iterations of that exchange on more occasions than any sane person could be bothered counting. I have had arguments with shop assistants, I have had them put my thing in that bag anyway, and I have stood at the counter and removed my thing from their bag and handed their bag back to them.

There are without question many reasons why the bag is a good idea: multiple things, things small that might get lost, things that need extra protection.

plastic soup

There are millions of tonnes of reasons why the bag is a bad idea. To say that plastic bags are an enviornmental disaster is an understatement of epic proportions. As well as the whole business of them clogging up the insides of sea-animals and looking bloody awful as they moulder away by the side fo the road, they suck up resources just being made. I admit that the report I got these facts from is a little out of date, having been put together in 2002 and had a whole sentence revised in 2006, I can only assume that things have got worse since then, though. So back when the Plastic Shopping Bags – Analysis of Levies and
Environmental Impacts was put together, Aussies were sucking down a lazy 6.9 billion plastic shopping bags a year. That’s roughly 1 bag per person, per day and that’s an awful lot of bin-liners. It also cost something in the vicinity of 2540 GJ to make them, and left us with 8.62 million cubic metres of litter, which is roughly 5 MCGs worth. A metric arseload, if you want to get technical.

Did I mention not being a huge fan of the plastic bag? Yes, they do have their uses, but there’s just no need to go nuts over them. Basic, stupid little things. I go to the supermarket. I put grapes and nuts and stuff into plastic bags (this kind aren’t actually part of the 6.9b in the study). I find that just dumping these things into my trolley is a futile exercise, makes the floor slippery (in the case of grapes) and too much of a challenge for those little trolley wheels (in the case of nuts) and I finish up with far less stuff than I’d originally planned. But why would you need to put oranges in a plastic bag, and then into another plastic bag at the checkout? Or bananas or avocadoes or pineapples or carrots or any of that stuff that you’re going to peel anyway?

The thing is, switching away from plastic bags is not exactly your life-changing experience. It’s not going to break your brain, it’s not going to cost you a fortune, it’s not going to radically change your lifestyle. But it will make a difference.

Did you know that in the North Pacific there’s a new continent forming? It’s called the trash vortex and it’s made of plastic bags.

ocean of plastic

Recently one of the supermarkets where I regularly shop was part of a government experiment where customers were required to pay for their plastic bags. A nominal amount, 5c, I think. I don’t know because I very, very seldom use supermarket plastic bags. It must have been in the week or so following the end of the experiment that I went in there to buy something to have for lunch at work. Since I work in the same shopping centre and didn’t have far to carry it, I said I didn’t want a bag.

‘It’s okay,’ the girl said. ‘You don’t have to pay for them any more.’

She couldn’t have been more wrong if she’d tried.

ps kudos to Germany, where in 1992 you had to pay for plastic supermarket bags. Kudos to Aldi, who have always had a “pay for bag” policy. Kudos to Bunnings, who, like Aldi, supply cardboard boxes from their packing for you to put your stuff in (thus also cutting down on their landfill) and don’t supply plastic bags at all. And today, good news from Target.

I’ve just spent the past 6 weeks in Brisbane. It’s 1600km (about a thousand miles) north of where I live and it’s different up there. Tropical and humid. One of my Brissie friends asked me what I thought of the weather and I told her I had no opinion because Brisbane has no weather. Seriously. It’s just 30º and humid up there.

Hot days, 31º, cool change, 29º. Really. Weather? They had none. During the entire 6 weeks we did not have the doors or windows of the flat we were staying in closed. Humidity was depressing. I always felt dirty.

On Friday I came home. Flying over Melbourne, everything was brown. No green. No green anywhere. The sky was orange/brown. The air was still and dry. My nose hurt and my throat hurt, that’s how dry it was.

On Sunday Monkey and I went to get a few groceries. As we went to the supermarket we heard the fire siren going off. We were only in there for a few minutes, and then back home. We live on the opposite side of the valley from the supermarket. The sirens had been going on and on and were still going off when we came out of the shop. Belgrave, Tecoma, up the hill, down the hill. All the sirens were going off. On a perfect hot, still day everyone was pitched and frightened. As Monkey turned the car into the end of our street I could see a man standing on the roadside (we don’t have footpaths in our suburb) and he was looking back across the valley. I could see the plume of smoke rising up.

We stood on our verandah and watched the fire. It was on Terrys Avenue which runs up the side of the supermarket carpark where we’d been only a few minutes earlier. Our son was on holiday with a friend whose family lives on Terry’s Avenue. One of my writing buddies called to tell me that the fire had started just a few doors away from where her brother lives (he had rushed his family to her house).

The wind was blowing from SE-ish so the fire was headed up the hill, away from us. Towards where my mum lives. To say I was pathetically greatful when the water-bombing helicopter flew overhead would be a vast understatement. I know there were plenty of CFA volunteers on the ground, but being able to see the helicopters at work gave us a real feeling of security, especially when the big Erikson skycrane turned up. I had my binoculars, the radio turned on and the scanner tuned in. Monkey took photos.

fire bomber

The fire was put out with no loss of life. Was it deliberately lit this time? Who knows. Could have been a cigarette butt chucked out of a car window or a lawn mower with a dodgy spark plug or a nine year old with no real concept of the situation. Who knows. This place is a tinderbox. A week of 40º+ has turned live plants into kindling and there’s no sign of rain. Someone told me one of those “facts” that there are three “well above average” places in the world for bushfire risk and ferocity and one was the South of France and one was Victoria (we thought California might have been the third, but we weren’t sure). But there you go. It’s nothing new, either. Black Thursday in 1851 was possibly a worse fire than this year’s (so far) but because the state wasn’t as heavily populated, less is known about it.

Black Thursday

Thing is, while all this fire and drough and stuff is going on in Victoria, Queensland is pretty much underwater. And I don’t mean that figuratively. They had a day with 300mm of rain. Then they had 3 more days with 200mm each day. To put it into perspective, 300mm is about a year’s worth.

Yeah. I know it’s a joke, but I’m over that now. It’s just about bloody time somebody did something about the weather.

I set up this site and then don’t write anything! I think I have a lot to say but seem to have a lot of difficulty getting it down on paper (well, screen really)

I’ve been somewhat galvanised by the recent events where I live.

We live in the hills east of Melbourne (about 40kms out) in Victoria, Australia. It is a beautiful place to live and we have been here for 22 years. We brought up our two children here, they went to the local primary and secondary schools and have many friends in the area. We love it here.

It is a bit of a high risk area for bushfires though, so we prepare for the summer. We rake up the leaves and twigs, cut the grass, burn off piles of stuff. I also have an old above ground swimming pool with about 40000 litres in it and a fire-fighting pump, hoses, couple of sprinklers for the yard. I never think I am well enought prepared but I try.

So, here I am last Saturday. I get the hoses out, run the pump test the hoses and setup the sprinklers. There were mud wasp nests in the sprinkler heads so cleaned them out and got it all working. We don’t have mains water, we have a tank and an electric pressure pump so in case the power goes out I can connect the petrol pump back into the house system and then still run all the garden hoses. I have a tap and hose on each side of the house. Spot fires watch out, I’ve got you covered!

And I sit back and just wait. The temperature climbs and I sit in the pool for a while. And the temperature climbs. By my thermometer it almost got to 45C which is about 113F. It got to 48.8 in Hopetoun in the west of the state, that is nearly 120F. Melbourne peaked at 46.3C which is the hottest on record. Did you also know that only a week earlier we had 4 days of over 40C, three of them hit 43C and the fifth one was still 37C.

A cloud of smoke appeared a couple of kilometers down the valley and the local CFA (Country Fire Authority, the local volunteer brigade) sirens went off 5 minutes later. There wasn’t a lot of wind about at the time and they got that fire out after about 10 minutes. There was another larger one in Ferntree Gully and the highway was closed most of the afternoon and the trainline was out as well.

The sky was strange, to the east there were large clouds of smoke and to the west, blue sky. The smoke was from north of the city, Kilmore and Kinglake had fires and they must have been large for that amount of smoke.

Then the cool change came. It was great! The temperature dropped from 45 to 28 in about half an hour. It was very pleasant.

Of course as most of you would have read and as I discovered later it was not so great for the people in Kinglake and Marysville, Labertouche and Churchill and many other places.

The wind change turned the fires broadside and the wind strengthened and drove the fires over the crispy dried forests and farms. The result was the loss of whole towns and the deaths of over 180 people.

I have heard and read many stories from survivors over the last 6 days. The stories about how quickly the fires appeared over the hill and how houses disappeared in the minutes.

I have always thought I was reasonably well prepared with my 40000 litres of water, pump, hoses and sprinklers. But now I realise how inadequate it is in the face of an event like last weekend.

Was it a once in a lifetime event? Serious bushfires, droughts or floods come once every 50 years so common folklore goes. That is the frequency that a farmer in the Australian climate expects to lose everything. Or so I have been told.

But of course we now get back to the reason for this blog. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Will we be getting more of these sort of events? Am I going to have to get used to over 40C temperatures?

I don’t think our house is built to withstand a fire of the magnitude seen in the last week. It is a cedar clad house, raised up on stumps with lots of underfloor space. So what do I do now? There are many houses like this in this area and we are all in the same predicament.

This is just one example of how climate change is going to affect us all. For some it will be drought and fire, others will get floods (Ingham in North Queensland) and some homes will just disappear under the waves.

Is there still any doubt that our excessive energy usage has and will continue to affect our climate? Doubt perhaps about how and how much but surely no more doubt about whether it will.

So now I sit here thinking about how to fireproof our house (can’t be done, but it can be improved). And I think about building a fire shelter (concrete, under the ground, between two concrete water tanks), and fire sprinklers for the house, and… who knows. None of makes a lot of sense at the moment.

I had to add the following photo as well. Taken by my son on his way up to Melbourne from Gippsland today. The photo was taken from the other side of Warragul, probably about 100kms from Melbourne. That cloud over the hills is smoke and is huge. We are somewhere under it to the left of the photo. The whole of Melbourne is covered in smoke at the moment, my eyes were watering as I was riding home. My sympathy goes out to anyone with asthma.

Peter Garrett

Yeah. You’ve got the song in your head now, don’t you? Midnight Oil’s anthem to the Stolen Generation is one of those songs that stays with you. Midnight Oil. Remember them? They were a force. A strong bunch of politically motivated men. Anti-uranium, pro-environment, on the side of the aboriginies. There was everything about them that I liked in real Aussie men – they weren’t afraid of the authority. They weren’t afraid to kick arse and to make you feel like a bit of a loser if you didn’t care.

So then, last year, there was an election and Peter Garrett put his money where his mouth was and became a politician. His party got in and wow. Peter Garrett. Minister for the Environment. Man, I have to tell you, I was excited. I was damned excited. We had Peter Garrett on our side. All the possums and wallabies and gum trees and whales and degraded land and insects and spiders and water tables and crocodiles and everyone. We all had him on our side and things were going to go good.

Minister for the Environment, Peter Garrett, is NOT a rock star.

And then he said it was okay to turn a pretty valley in Tasmania into a pulp mill. And thought that smiling and being nice to the Japanese would stop them from sending whaling ships into Australian Antarctic waters. And gave the nod to a uranium mine to use a process that will involve radioactive water leaching back into the water table.

Now this blog is not about how Peter Garrett gives me the shits. It’s about how all politicians give me the shits and they do it because they think they are rock stars.

They’re not.

They’re public servants.

Now I want you to repeat that phrase

public servants

PUBLIC SERVANTS

PUBLIC SERVANTS

Yeah. Getting that second bit?

SERVANTS

Because we are the boss of them. They are NOT rock stars. They are NOT media gurus. They are NOT in charge of it all, they are our servants. We pay them to do what we want.

Somehow this fact got a little lost in the translation and there seems to be some sort of belief that either they are media celebrities who we all want to know, or that they are actually the tools of very rich people, and are there to help said very rich people get even richer.

We need to spend a lot more of our time kicking the pollies off their arses and reminding them that we each get one vote and that our vote carries exactly the same weight as the vote of someone with squillions of dollars.

GetUp. This will take you to their website.

GetUp is a great arse-kicking tool. They are not in love with any political party and they stick up for the rights of everyone. Basically, (for those who remember the Democrats, aren’t they defunct now?) GetUp is there to keep the bastards honest. Worth a look to keep up with the good work they’re doing.

And of course the other site where you can make yourself heard is this

click here for a link to the federal pollie of your choice

one. *Because nothing feels quite as good as shooting an email off to a pollie and telling them how bad they are. Or how good they are (makes a nice change). These people are our servants and we need to remind them of that. We really do.

*Actually, that’s a complete lie. Heaps of things feel better than emailing politicians. I mean even cleaning the kitchen bench feels better than that, but you know what I mean. Contact a pollie. Give them a bit of encouragement. Give them a bit of constructive criticism. You’ll get a warm fuzzy out of it.

Anyway, that’s my contribution for today. Next time I’m going to have a bit of a rant about ex-Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, who clearly lives in fairyland.

what's your excuse?

Thought for the day:

politicians are public servants. We are the boss of them. They have no excuses. Neither do we.

The Story of Stuff

The first time I saw this little film must be pretty close to when it first came out, because I notice that Annie has just celebrated the first anniversary of The Story of Stuff. Go Annie.

I’ve often pondered the pointlessness of the work so that you can consume so that you can work treadmill and it’s so well illustrated in this film. It’s very American and Monkey says I should find some Aussie stats to go with, but you get the idea. We’re just as bad (or worse) than they are.

Now I have to say that when it comes to stuff, I am guilty as charged. I love stuff. I love shopping. Christmas is my favourite time of year and I am in my element, hunting for gifts and wrapping them up. Monkey is pretty “meh” about the whole thing, but I actually had a nightmare last week that I forgot to get him a Christmas pressie. Frankly I think that the whole shopping thing is an expression of our hunter/gatherer ancestors and I have a really atavistic gene.

Which doesn’t excuse me at all. So I’m making more of an effort to not be embarrassed about second hand Christmas presents, presents that have to be eaten up or drunk, or donations to charity given as gifts (like those nifty Oxfam cards.)

Thing is, I want those grandchildren (the ones that exist only in my imagination so far) to be able to enjoy Christmas, too. So I know I have to make a bigger effort with the stuff.

Monkey was a little concerned about his last post. He didn’t think it was right to talk about veggie gardens in this blog. Too little. Just a feelgood thing. Not going to make enough of a difference.

I get that, but let me tell you a little bit more about Monkey and me: he’s the cynic and I’m Pollyanna. So I’m going to say why I think even a pot with a tomato plant stuck in it, yellowing away on your windowsill and not producing much at all is still a good thing:

Because it’s a reminder. That all that shiny, plastic-wrapped stuff we buy in the supermarket doesn’t come from nowhere. A couple of years ago there was a huge storm on the north coast of NSW and we had no bananas. For months.

Connections between people and land and resources and the environment are all laced together, all interdependent. We are all a part of this.

I’ve always been a bit in love with the idea of growing our own fruit and veggies, even though I totally suck at it. I guess this is because I grew up on my nana’s 1/4 acre block in Oakleigh and we had an apple tree, apricot, 2 cherries (magic at Christmas), plum tree, nectarine (which also contained the world’s greatest cubbyhouse), a quince and an almond. The trees were a part of our family lore – we always talked about the year the apricot was struck by lightning and split down the middle, we never ate an apple without a knife in one hand because they were rotten with coddlin moth grubs, but no apples ever tasted better.

At my other nana’s house, Pop had the veggie patch and there were always fresh tomatoes, potatoes, peas, carrots and beans.

I know. It’s an old thing and blocks aren’t that big any more and who has the time anyway. I spend most of the year buying my tomatoes from the supermarket and wondering why in hell those guys on TV can grow such great veggies when mine all either die or never get big in the first place.

But we made a big effort this year. And by that, I mean a couple of weekends. And I work a lot on weekends, so it’s not like I have all my Saturdays and Sundays to spare. But I think we’ll be harvesting our first zucchini by the end of the week, and the tomatoes are hanging like little green Chrissy balls on the plants, and there are flowers on the peas and chillis, and I reckon if we can do it, then anyone can.

Even if it’s just a hanging pot with a few tomatoes in it, it’ll look kind of Christmassy, and they’ll taste great, and you’ll be reminded that tomatoes are real.

I never liked supermarkets much. All that packaging with things purporting to be food containing who knows what chemicals and coming from … where? China, USA, New Zealand (well, at least that is a little closer).

We have started our own veggie garden and that might help a little or just feed up the possums, slugs and snails. I used to be an avid veggie gardener but have not had the time to do it justice for many years and I don’t really envisage the rest of my life growing stuff just so I can have a rest of my life. There are other people who run farms and grow things and I’m sure they can do it far better than I ever could. And that gets me to my point. I’ve been looking for some alternatives to shopping at the supermarket and after a short search found the following two companies who deliver locally grown produce to your door, and the pricing seems reasonable.

http://www.gippslandleanbeef.com.au/

http://www.thegreenline.com.au/

Now I can’t vouch for either of these companies as I haven’t dealt with either but I will be soon and I’ll update this post with the results.

This blog is a personal record of a journey of discovery and learning that my partner and I are embarking on.

For to many years we have kept our nose to the grindstone and ignored what is going on in the world around us. Two recent events have changed that for us.

1. The recent financial events that seem to have come about since no one in the financial world really understood what was going on and it seems didn’t really want to understand as long as it all kept growing.
2. Coming across the videos on Youtube of a lecture by Dr Albert Bartlett (thanks Bertie for forwarding that link to me!)

I doubt that two people writing a blog can change much by themselves. But if each of us can convince two other people and each of those two more and so on then as Dr Bartlett explains very simply and convincingly in his lecture, we can change the world.

We welcome comments from all, positive and negative, and will try to keep the comments system open to all but the problem of SPAM may make this difficult.

So welcome and I hope that we can make this blog at least a little bit interesting for others to read.