JohnB

I'm willing to let the population stabilise at the level it stabilises at.

You're the one that keeps going on about limits. What figure do you think? Rather than some vague hand waving about "sustainability" or that population might become "unsustainable" at some obscure point in the future, how about you put some figures up?

(It would help if you could provide some sort of reliable proof as to why the figure is correct.)

The 4 million we have is quite sustainable, but presumably 10 billion would not be. What is your limit and why?

Because those immigrants also incur costs to tax payers - welfare payments, increased public infrastructure, increased capacity at public hospitals and more public hospitals, increased electcity generation capacity, increased water supply,.........

 

And my argument is that beyond a certain threshhold, related to the carrying capacity of the country, the total costs to the host society exceed any revenue that the increased economic activity generates.

 

Immigrants are certainly increasing economic activity in Australia within the housing market. But that is not bringing any benefit to the majority of Australians. Wages may be increased but so have property prices and mortgage repayments,

Hang on. If the immigrants are incurring costs to taxpayers due to welfare payments, then they obviously don't have any money. Property prices are based on what people are able to pay. (You can put any price you want to on a property, but if nobody is willing or able to pay that price, you just won't sell.) So people with money drive up prices.

Just how the hell do immigrants on welfare (the lowest socio-econmomic group) drive up the prices of houses that they can't afford to buy?

As Cap'n points out, the fallacy here is a type of false attribution. You are applying the attributes of bacteria and their resource systems to humans and their resource systems and forming a conclusion based on that.

Similarly it ignores that we aren't restricted to this one planet. Both Venus and Mars are candidates for terraforming, requiring only the technology and will to do so. Similarly there is an entire asteroid belt available for the mining of resources. (As well as a number of planet sized moons.)

These things have to be allowed for if projecting into a far and indefinite future.

Greg, we did come close, sort of. The dams were down to 19% or thereabouts.

Why do you think that was? Because of the drought? Or because the population went from 2 million to 4 million people and we didn't build any more dams for drinking water? Taking a problem caused by lack of infrastructure planning as evidence for climate change is a pretty poor showing.

If the dams that were planned had actully been built, then there wouldn't have been a problem, the floods earlier this year would have been less too.

Note that the operators of Wivenhoe relied on the "no further rainfall" models of the Flannery camp and failed to release water from the dam as the operators manual required. This led to too much water being held and the emergency release that raised the level of the Ipswich and Brisbane floods.

A near miss is not evidence of incompetence John.

No, but following the advice and having a disaster ensue is.

Mate, keep trying. In the Queensland Art Gallery is a painting about 6 foot wide and 4 high. It's a light sandy colour with a smattering of green drops on it. The title is "The Australian Outback from 30,000 feet". Many of the artworks go downhill from there.

I am a little in awe of Oz - and had just assumed they were the brave new world down under; oops.

Nah, they make too much sense for them to be from Oz. We do things like "brown cardboard set in concrete". Seriously, it's in the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. The artist got $25,000 for 20 square bits of concrete with torn carboard set into them. I guess it's a good lurk if you can get it.

As it is definitely criminal damage and possibly aggravated trespass I think I should make it clear I was talking hypothetically - I will answer any questions (from a hypothetical viewpoint) that you might have. The bigger the pattern, the more complicated, the better the organisation that is required; you only have a few hours, so preparation and planning are essential. You do not go drunk or without knowing exactly which pattern and at what location. It's a nerds pastime - ie it requires detail, planning, forethought, and a general lack of spontaneity.

Of course any discussion would have to be on a purely theoretical basis.

I think the Incas thought in a very similar way - if those blocks were square they would be an impressive but fairly boring wall. Irregular - but tooled to fit together almost perfectly (you cannot fit a postcard in the gaps) they bridge the gap between nature and technology.

When you're building without wheels, I think that this might then classify as "Art for arts sake". They might have wanted their walls to be works of art and not just walls. Choosing the more difficult path out of a love of form rather than function. There have been some amazing civilisations in the past and frankly I don't think we've found them all yet, I think that there are surprises yet to come.

Australia also exports a significant amount of grain to third world countries. And with the global population expected to peak at at least 9 billion, third world countries are going to be even more dependant on any surplus that we can produce.

Well here's an idea. Let's help them to improve their economies and agriculture and they won't be as dependent on our grain.

By world standards our coastal fisheries are meagre and that is primarily due to our low rainfall, scant run off from our rivers and low nutrient levels in our soils that results in low nutrient levels in that run-off.

Part right at best, if you delete the word "primarily". There are three reasons that Australian fishing grounds are less productive. One reason is the lower nutrients in the run off, another is the lack of any decent upwelling and the third are the main east and west coast currents which bring the nutrient poor waters from the tropics down south. (DAFF) Now since the 5% of the oceans that have decent upwellings provide 25% of the worlds annual catch, it would appear that these are far more important than anything else. About the best that can be said is "If you don't have an upwelling, and your coasts are fed by nutrient poor currents, then you'd better hope for good run off."

We do what we can with what we have, aiming for economic profitability and sustainability. (And we export a lot of fish as well.) I'll certainly grant that in the future one of our big problems could be preventing others who have overfished and destroyed their own fisheries from pillaging ours. That battle has already started in the northern waters.

And as I said that production is only possible due to the heavy use of unsustainable fertilisers and it cannot and will not be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later fertilisers will run out due to peak oil and farmers will not be able to sustain those sorts of yields based on the natural productivity of our soils. Regular droughts bankrupt many farmer and they are expected to grow longer and more frequent due to global warming.

You are ignoring the improved yields and drought resistence of the GM modified grains. Whether this will be enough is still up for argument I would guess, but the factor is there. And expected by who? CSIRO? Their last long range forecast got the south of Perth right, the predictions for the rest of the country were wrong. But we get warnings of more drought and more rain, gotta love people that take a bet each way. Do people have no memory? Back in the 70s we had kids running inside screaming because they had never seen water fall from the sky. 6 and 7 year olds who had never seen rain.

But let's try a bit of logic. If an increase in temps is going to lead to more "extreme" weather events, then presumably the .8 degrees that we've had would have led to an increase in those events. Has there been an increase? No. Through the media we tend to notice extreme events more and due to people building on floodplains or coastal areas where cyclones tend to cross the coast the damage bill goes up, but extreme events aren't more common. How about a nice logical reason why temp rise will cause more extreme events in the future when it hasn't in the past.

No upward trends in the occurrence of extreme floods in central Europe.

TRENDS IN EXTREME DAILY RAINFALL AND TEMPERATURE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC: 19611998.

Long-Term Trends in Extreme Precipitation Events over the Conterminous United States and Canada.

On a regional scale you would perhaps agree that a cyclone is an "extreme weather event"? In another thread I counted the cyclones in the Australian region as listed by the BOM.

The figures for annual cyclones in the Australian region are;

1970:1

1971:4

1972:4

1973:15

1974:13

1975:10

1976:16

1977:13

1978:8

1979:13

1980:19

1981:12

1982:12

1983:14

1984:17

1985:14

1986:14

1987:7

1988:6

1989:13

1990:13

1991:9

1992:10

1993:8

1994:11

1995:9

1996:16

1997:10

1998:11

1999:11

2000:11

2001:9

2002:8

2003:9

2004:10

2005:10

2006:11

2007:9

2008:8

2009:9

2010:9

The period 1976-1986 only had one year with less than 12 cyclones yet since 1991 there has only been one year with more than 12. Cyclones are decreasing in our little corner of the planet.

It is not an unfounded view John. It is a view expressed by Tim Flannery and many other respected environmental scientists in Australia.

Tim Flannery? Tim the "Sydney is going to run out of water" and "droughts may become permanent" Flannery? Tim the "Perth may become the first ghost town of the 21st Century" Flannery? Tim the "Brisbane and Melbourne both urgently require desal plants" Flannery? (The Brisbane one being in mothballs and the Melbourne one unfinished due to prolonged rain.) Tim the "sea level rise could cover an 8 story building, but I'm buying a beachfront property" Flannery? Tim the "There are islands in the Torres Strait that are already being evacuated and are feeling the impacts" Flannery? (Funny how nobody can actually find an island being evacuated, isn't it?)

How can someone whose every prediction and warning has been wrong possibly be called "respected"? How many times does he have to be wrong before people realise he's full of it? I'm sure his change of support from nuclear to geothermal has absolutely nothing to do with his being a paid consultant to a geothermal company that he not only has shares in but has already recieved some $90 million in government funding. Does nobody understand the concept of "Conflict of Interest"? The guy who is advising the government on who should get grants has shares in a company that has already recieved money and is expected to get even more, and this isn't at all fishy?

Rubbish! That defies common sense. The fertiliser and pesticide load in the water clearly increases as it it gets closer to the sea, due to multiple users of the water eaching adding their bit to the water they use that then returns to the river, and this has been demonstrated by many scientists on many occassions.

 

Salinity of river water demonstrably increases as the river gets closer to the sea. Or is your contention that the salination problems in the Murray River, due to irrigation schemes, is all a fallacy?

It doesn't defy common sense. When water is dammed and diverted for drinking, the pesticides, etc are filtered out, hence the water coming out of the town system is lower in those things than the "normal" river water. Think of it this way. Let's say the "normal" amount of those pollutants was 10ppm. If we divert half the water for drinking then the pollutants in that water are removed. When the towns wastewater is released back into the system it will dilute the pollutants remaining in the river. I have 10 litres of water at 10ppm, I then take 5 litres and remove the pollutants, I then pour the clean water back into the original container. The resulting concentration is 5 ppm.

Note I'm talking about towns and not farms, concerning farms what you say is correct.

Regarding salinity in the Murray-Darling we have a two part problem. Land use change is causing a rise in salinity, but it's not magic. The salt was already there as the Murray-Darling Basin is an old sea bottom, the land is simply full of salt.

(As an aside I spent quite some time in Mildura as a kid. Back then they were using a straight "pour the water between the vine rows" irrigation. I was amazed that even after 100 years of this sort of irrigation there was salt crusted between the grape vines every time they watered. It was like a thin crusting of white ice, you could actually pick it up.)

So the Murray is a true "Catch 22" situation. If we keep the dams and weirs we increase the salinity and will have to fight it. Recent programs show we aren't doing too bad and salinity is decreasing in the region. The problem is almost certainly going to get worse in the future. However, without the dams and weirs, there won't be a river.

This is the Murray with dams and weirs at Ravenswood in 2010 before the drought broke.

This is the Murray without dams and weirs at Ravenswood in 1915 before the drought broke.

(I've always wondered, where do the Murray Cod go when the river dries up? I mean it's a fresh water, not salt water fish, so they can't go into the ocean and a couple of pools and billabongs wouldn't hold enough for thier numbers to replentish as quickly as they do. How the hell did they survive?)

Obviously we need to find some sort of happy medium. Something that allows for the fullest use of the land consistent with the best health of the river. And carefully noting that the "natural" state is decidedly not a river in good health.

imatfaal. I googled "modern sculpture" pictures.

The first is a modern sculpture near the highway exit in Florence, Italy.

The second (which I think is a beauty, BTW) is "Solfar Suncraft Sculpture by Jon Gunnar Arnason" and is in Reykjavik.

The third is the HOMA Hotel, "Hotel of Modern Art" in Yangshuo, China. The pic is from Mr and Mrs Smiths Travelblog.

You're a circle maker? Cool! Would you consider starting a thread on the subject? There are heaps of questions I'd like to ask. I've sometimes wondered if all circles could be made by man as I don't see how the really big and complex ones can be done fast enough. A discussion and some answers on the subject would be great.

Greg,

Point taken. But wasn't pretty much all major art associated with religion and temples in ancient times. Perhaps except for brief periods of time such as the Ionian awakening.

 

If the Nazcas were going to engage in art or art's sake then surely it would have been around their homes, palaces and settlements rather than on a remote plain in the middle of no where.

The problem is the never ending cycle. We classify things we don't identify as "religious" due to the idea that religion played a large part in their lives, but we assume religion played a large part in their lives due to all the items classified as religious. What people miss is that "religion" in early cultures was often very pragmatic. If you were defeated in battle, then the other guys God was better then yours and people would worship the new God. If rain didn't come and prayers to your God didn't work, then you try praying to other Gods, the one being prayed to when the rains came was the winner. Gods that didn't supply the needs of the people were discarded or absorbed into the new Gods. Bottom line is that religion then is nothing like religion now.

Note that the early glyphs were done so that they could be viewed from the lower regions. We are perhaps assuming the human figures are Gods, they might have been Kings, carved into the hillsides to show how they watch over their people or to declare who the land belongs to. A modern version being;

The later glyphs are on the plateau. Maybe they didn't want to overwrite the traditional "Kings" ones? As to the change in style, styles in art change? Impossible! Artists today are still painting the same way as Leonardo, aren't they? Styles in art change and there doesn't have to be a reason.

The above isn't to say that the theory in the doco is wrong, it may well be right. I'm really just cautioning against accepting a "religious" interpretation (or any, for that matter) in an uncritical fashion. The theory could be right or wrong, without a written language it's hard to make a definitive statement as to the cause of something.

If those who are reading this thread haven't seen it, do follow Gregs link to the show and take an hour to watch it. It is very, very good.

Janus,

The difference is that the structures in these pictures were made by a a civilization that was technologically advance enough to be able to afford to divert resources for such luxuries as large structures which are just "art for art's sake." A pre-industrial civilization wouldn't have that kind of freedom with it resources.

I think that you are underestimating the abilities of those old cultures. The existence of large silos or storage facilities implies that feeding the population wasn't a constant thing, there were growing seasons. The best example of this is the inundation of the Nile in pharonic Egypt, where for 3 months of the year your farmers were idle due to flooding. Why not have them work on large structures rather be idle and cause trouble? If the original climate at Nazca caused a similar situation, why not keep the people busy with "Art for arts sake"?

The ancient peoples were different. The pyramids were built without wheel or pulley, the great cities of South America were built without the wheel. These peoples developed technologies that we simply cannot imagine. It's not magic, or anything silly like that. Simply the logical conclusion from understanding that while human thought shapes technology, so does technology and available materials shape human thought. Due to the differences in technologies and resources, they approached problems differently to the way we would. Even something as recent as "Archimedes Claw" is a mystery to us because we don't think the same way.

Why did the Aztecs at Sacsayhuaman build the walls the way they did?

Why not square up the blocks? Because they didn't think the way we do. What I'm getting at is that with the obvious fact that they didn't think the same way, we should be very wary when using modern modes of thought about things to ascribe motives to an ancient culture.

Again, I'm not saying the theory in the doco is wrong, simply that I don't think that there is enough clear evidence to declare it right.

Greg, I'm confused. You say;

Humanitarian immigrants in Australia, particularly those who can't speak English, get unemployment benefits and health care cards because they can't get jobs even many years after they have arrived. No one will employ them if they can't speak english.

So if they can't speak English they can't economically contribute to the nations welfare. But you are also complaining about the costs of those persons which include;

English language tuition through the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)

So they can't be employed due to lack of English, but spending money to teach them English so that they can integrate into society and become employable is wrong? That's like complaining about a lack of sparkies and then complaining about the electricians apprentice program.

A lot of the other things you mention;

Free ways and major roads or more severely congested for longer than they were in the 80s and 90s, hospital waiting lists have blown out, the number of people unable to purchase property without significant government handouts has grown, water restrictions have been imposed for the past decade, public transport is not adequate to meet demand,...........

Have bugger all to do with immigration and far more to do with politics and economic mismanagement. Water is short in some areas because while the population grew we haven't built a drinking water dam in over 20 years anywhere in Australia. Apparently saving a non endangered lungfish was more important. As to the rest, in the 10 years since 2001 the Queensland government income has risen from $17 billion to $37 billion. Mining royalties etc have gone from $4.8 billion to $10.4 billion, fees for government services from $1.8 billion to $4.8 billion. Government income has more than doubled but the population hasn't. That there are still the problems you mentioned isn't due to immigration, but from pure, basic economic incompetence. Any gov that can more than double its income in 10 years and still be forced to sell off assets and go into debt is a bloody disaster.

I can't speak for the other States, but Queensland is doing well economically in spite of and not because of our State Gov.

Edit to add.

I also run a small business and I'll employ the best person for the job, be he/she black, white, brindle or polka dotted. So long as their command of English is good enough to understand instructions and they can competently carry out those instructions, that's all that matters. I've run large projects using immigrants as casuals and have found them to be generally very grateful to be here and damn hard workers. I probably had more trouble from the Irish workers than any others, especially the poor bastards who managed to get out of Darfour.

How about cutting them a bit of slack? Many have lost their entire families and are not only trying to learn and become part of Australia, but are trying to unlearn a lot too. Little things like; The cops won't break down your door and rape and kill your family, you know, little stuff.

As to employing immigrants over Australians, from the POV of the Aboriginals we're all bloody immigrants.

Well gods and religions in one form or another did rule the lives of the vast majority ancient people until perhaps until the late 1800s or so.

 

So I would have thought that it is not unreasonable for archaelogists to assume that structures had a religious function when there is no obvious daya to day practical function discernible.

 

What practical function could a drawing in the dirt possibly serve anyway?

Fair enough as far as it goes, but things are far too easily classified as "religious" at times. I'm speaking in general, rather than the specific of Nazca here.

Here are a few things that have no obvious day to day practical function, are they religious too?

See my point? Just because we can't see an obvious use for something doesn't mean that those who built it did so for religious reasons.

And if we do expand our population so that all our surplus food is consumed locally, what about those third world countries that are critically dependant on our food exports????

You mean like America, Europe and Russia? We export something like 80% of our grain harvest so to consume all our grain we would need a population of 100 million or so. It ain't going to happen. 40 million maybe, sometime, perhaps, but that is about it. It's not going to happen soon anyway.

If the river are prevented from running out to see then you will reduce or eliminate our already meagre fisheries. They are dependant on the nutrients that rivers dump into the ocean.

Meagre fisheries? 240,000 tonnes per year is meagre? http://adl.brs.gov.au/data/warehouse/pe_abare99014411/ii_aust_fisheries.pdf I wouldn't call that meagre at all. Similarly many of our fishing areas are quite some distance from the coast, it is highly unlikely that any nutrients from rivers make it that far out. (At least in sufficient quantities to have a meaningful effect)

Compared to other countries of a similar size but geologically younger and more fertile, our grain production is very low.

I wouldn't say "very low", especially for such a dry country. Ausgrain puts the yield as varying, but with most states running at 2 tonnes/hectare, Tasmania is higher running at around 4 depending on weather. This means an average of about 30 bushels/acre as the yanks measure it, going up to 60 for Tassie. US wheat production is around 42 bushels/acre. So we are less than the US, but in no way can it be called "very low".

Nothing personal , but clearly you are not all that ecologically literate and have not properly thought your position through.

If you mean that I don't believe every unfounded view espoused to me, I guess I am. The thing that you ar forgetting is that dams don't stop the water flowing to the ocean, they simply divert it through the towns and cities first, it still finishes up in the oceans. In the process, all the nasty pesticides, etc are removed from the water before it gets to the sea. The thing is that ideologically based assertions require neither an indepth knowledge of a field, nor deep thought to refute.

Definitely an interesting theory. It took me a minute to realise it could be watched online, but it's now saved to disc as well. (The benefit of Realplayer. )

I'll look into it some more as it's a new and novel interpretation. Perhaps the only real reservation I have is that after reading as much archaeology as I have, the "religious" explanation is wearing a bit thin. Got a large building you can't identify? Or an impliment you don't know the use for? File it under "Possibly/Probably of religious significance."

Religious/Spiritual reasons are a bit of a catch all in archaeology. A secondary difficulty with the Nazca people is that they had no written language so everything is surmised and falls into the "as if" category. (The second was used a couple of times in the doco.)

Having said all that, the core data, etc would definitely imply climate change as the best reason for the fall.

WRT the OP. I didn't see any mention of overpopulation or deforestation as factors. The climate changed and became desert, they were forced to move or die.

Thanks for that link. Looks like an interesting program.

Gillard is the PM not Abbott, so what's your point?

Besides, this land can support many more than we have. We exported over 200,000 tonnes of beef and veal last year. We export Thor only knows how many million tonnes of grain, we even export half our milk production. (That was a surprise)

We have masses of land and enough uranium to power us until the sun goes red. And if we built dams rather than letting it run out to sea, we would have heaps of water. We are in danger is not being able to support ourselves or a larger population.

I think he has a future in Nashville, but he could be a "One hit wonder".

I also think he makes a valid point. One of the things I've yet to understand about the US system is "Why is the President always the one blamed?" He's not a dictator, so presumably anything he proposes goes before Congress and is voted on. If the Bill passes that would mean that Congress agrees. Similarly a Bill originating in Congress goes to the President for his veto/non veto, but he didn't write the Bill, he agreed to it after Congress had passed it.

The constant finger pointing at the President, whether Bush or Obama lets the Congressmen/women get off scot free. They can start and pass a Bil and if it goes belly up, the President gets the blame for assenting to it. The third verse in the song is directly aimed at the Congress, "Everyone looks like a nail". The buck might stop at the Presidents desk, but he isn't the one passing the Bills.

In comparison, we are facing the introduction of a very unpopular tax, polls are consistently showing 85%+ are against it. The Prime Minister Julia Gillard is copping a lot of flak over it (as she should) but all Federal Labour politicians are now very loathe to be interviewed because they know they will cop stick too. (Some have been publicly laughed at while trying to defend the position.) But it seems that in the US, in a similar situation, only the President will be on the recieving end of criticism.

Congress must be complicite in the passing of bad policies, it's nice to see someone pointing the finger at them for a change.

It is strongly suspected that yet another great human civilisation fell in part due to over population and in part due to climate change.

Suspected by whom? References please.

I didn't see the show. (Haven't really watched TV in years now)

But yes, it sounds very familiar. Can anything more clearly demonstrate that governments and their "Expert advisors" have very little idea of what the population need and want in their communities?

It's like Gillards "building program". Some schools are short on AV equipment, textbooks, pens and paper, but they have a shiny new hall. (That cost 3 times what it should have.)

That would be true of replacement of existing plants was what was happening, but it isn't. The newer plants are being built to expand power generation capacity, because worldwide electricity demand is growing.

 

The real question is what is the cost to replace a plant vs the carbon tax? That's going to depend on how the tax is structured — if it's just a straight proportional tax then a new plant will be taxed less, but of the tax has thresholds, it may be that a new plant is not taxed much if at all. (i.e. you are taxing CO2 that is in excess of some amount per MWh produced) You've said that the tax will be costly, but how does that compare to the cost of replacing the old coal plants?

Swansont, last part first. It's estimated that the tax will end up dragging some $58 billion out of our economy to buy overseas carbon credits.

To answer the first part and iNows;

Where my mind goes with this is toward the need for significant investments to get ourselves closer to that point where more than 90% of our energy is produced cleanly... and the need to get ourselves to that point more quickly. I think that if we're making large capital investments now... up front... it would be best to use that money with a longer term view... to aggregate that capital on the method of energy production which pollutes the least, and then to focus additional investments toward scaling up that clean energy production method as quickly as possible.

I'm thinking of this from the mid-term POV. Wind etc, simply aren't enough to provide baseload in the short to mid term. The Mt Piper etc, are indeed expansions, my point here is that once the expansion is online decommission and replace the two old generators as well, so the plany has 4 new ones rather than 2 old and two new. Quite often the argument seems to divide into two camps, the "Keep coal" and the "Get rid of coal" groups. This is a middle ground option.

Let's assume that we know that in 50 years the various renewables will be mature enough for baseload power usage. So do we;

A. Keep using the old coal for 50 years and then change to the renewables. or

B. Change to new coal tech for the next 50 years and then change to renewables.

Over the next 50 years until the change is complete, which option is going to reduce the consumption of resources and general pollution? What is the best option right now? Look at it another way, at the moment coal is the cheapest and dirtiest option while wind is the cleanest and most expensive option. Rather than going for one or the other, isn't it more sensible and economically sound to go for the cheapest, cleanest option?

Think of it this way on a graph with emission/pollution on one axis and cost on the other. So as we move across and cost goes up, pollutants go down. Rather than arguing about which end of the graph it is better to be at, why not aim for the area in the middle where the lines cross? Giving you the cheapest power with the lowest emissions, maximising both benefits.

The other very definite point is that we simply can't predict what power sources will be available in 50 years time. It might be wind, it might be solar, it might be that the Rossi device pans out, it might come from a breakthrough in physics that we can't predict and be something incredible. We just don't know.

This is almost a philosophical thing. What the article and I are arguing for is this guiding principle. That a society should be using the cheapest, cleanest power available while at the the same time researching cheaper, cleaner alternatives.

even though the plant you reference makes it slightly cleaner and has some short term benefit for some local isolated communities.

I think you have a misconception here. The Australian grid is quite interconnected as a National grid, the benefits are for decades and would involved the entire country. I'm thinking from an economical POV.

Say you have $50 billion to spend. Using the figures in the post above, you could spend $42 billion on 12,000 wind towers (which doesn't count the cost of aquiring the land or the rather extensive wiring needed to hook that many towers into the grid) and shut down 3 power stations, saving 18 million tonnes of coal each year once the project is finished. The remaining $8 billion you spend on R&D. How long would such a project take? 15 years? 20? For 15 years you will be installing and hooking into the grid 15 towers every week. Note that you won't be able to take a coal station offline until the project is at least 1/3 complete.

OR

You spend $40 billion to upgrade 8 power stations. This could be done in under 5 years and saves 2 million tonnes per station, or 16 million tonnes per year from the fifth year. The wind towers will have rusted themselves to a stop before they match the coal (and CO2) savings of the coal stations and you get to spend $10 billion on R&D.

The really silly thing down here is the nuclear option is off the table. Our "Greens" are so bloody silly they are even against the small one we have for producing isotopes for medical research and treatment. There are times I daydream about Bob Brown getting some horrible disease that requires radiation therapy, just to watch him squirm. (If that sounds personal, it is. I have a fundamental objection to politicians who promote policies that would have resulted in my suffering a drawn out, painful death.)

First up.

Swansont, perhaps a better title would have been "Cut CO2 emissions = Burn Coal". What I thought interesting about the engineers idea was that it looked at an area which is normally missed. Most discussions revolve around "What will we build in the future" or "what do we replace coal with to reduce emissions". This is the first example I've seen of replacing coal with far more efficient coal. No CCS, or any possible, maybe, future tech just replace the old stations with new ones. Looking from the POV that a government wants to spend money to "do something", this option gives a very good bang for the buck, but hasn't been really discussed.

CaptainPanic, I'll deal with the "subsidies" first. First and foremost, the Wiki page is wrong. I've got no idea what fantasyland the page editors are in, but the references generally don't back the claims.

Geoscience Australia (GA) provided a $107 million subsidy for energy in 2005–06. The 2006–07 budget involved 66 projects of which 11 are allocated to petroleum research and others related to mineral and mining industry. On a much smaller scale, the subsidy allocated to saving climate change was 'storage of GHG' with a subsidy of $0.6 million.

The referenced source is here. By scrolling down to page 26 we find that both "Grants" and "Subsidies" expenditure is zero. On page 35 they do show that they administer a $20,000 grant for another department.

The Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources (DITR), similarly to GA, provided a A$30 million energy technology fund in 1994–95. This increased to a government-funded $1,314 million subsidy which divides into 52 branches. 95% of Australia's electricity originates from fossil fuels, which make the power industry quite profitable. The DITR supports fossil fuel research with 95% of its total budget, leaving less than 5% for renewable energy technology.

The referenced source is here. The referenced page 12 actually deals with expected growth in the Aluminium sector towards 2029-2030. While the report does indeed say that Australia gets 95% of its power from fossil fuels (Page 2) it is about energy usage and generation projections towards 2029-2030 and makes no mention of subsidies.

As to the other 3 references for the "Subsidies", one is from a lobby group to a Senate Committee, one is from an activist and the last is from Greenpeace. The reach they have to go to in an attempt to find subsidies should indicate how little there are. They include things like selling power more cheaply to the aluminium industry, I guess they never heard of "bulk purchase discounts" and the road network. If the road network is a "subsidy" for the oil and coal industries, then it must also be a "subsidy" for the catering, food production, book, baby diaper and fishing industries as well.

In contrast, in the 2011-2012 Federal budget the expected incomes are Company and petroleum resouce rent tax $76.6 billion and Petroleum Excise $17.1 billion. That the Feds. Queensland this year will recieve $3.4 billion in royalties (Page 94), on top of which the coal etc, is transported on trains owned by the government (so we get a fee for that) and go to ports controlled by government "Port Authorities" and we get fees for that.

And if we are going to count tax rebates on R&D expenses as "subsidies" (which Greenpeace et al do) then just about everybody gets a subsidy.

So with that out of the way, let's look at the costs.

Investment costsThe reason coal is so cheap, is that we're using very old power stations which (because of their age) have zero depreciation. All they have is regular maintenance, which admittedly is higher than for new power stations. Still, it is cheaper to keep an old station running than to build a new one.

 

Although I cannot quickly find a source for this: I think that the payback time (the period over which depreciation is counted) is significantly longer for a coal power station than for a wind turbine.

I would agree with you on these points. The major difference being that a coal power station will also last far longer than a wind farm does. While the wind industry claims a life expectancy of 20-25 years, very few have made it that far and most die well before then. Life expectancy for a turbine is very much a "We think the new tech will last that long" with very little track record as evidence conversely it is easy to show a coal station lasts for 40 years.

Operating costs

If you just compare the investment costs of the coal power station to the wind turbine, I can guarantee that the coal power station is cheaper. But wind power does not need 25 kg of coal for every GJ it produces. So, that is not really a fair comparison, is it?

Certainly true. But it would appear that wind gearboxes will have to be changed rather more frequently in wind farms. Even with the large subsidies etc for wind, the maintainence costs were so high that there are now 6 abandoned wind farms in Hawaii alone, along with some thousands of abandoned turbines in Tehachapi Pass, California. I expect that the European experience is very different, however I would think that maintainence per kilowatt hour works out to be higher than a coal plant. (I wouldn't mind seeing some figures on this, my assumption is based on the fact that anything more than a minor service will be a pretty big operation given the turbines are so high. It's not like you can just work on it, it has to be craned down to ground level first.)

Total price

Wind power has a clear price:

Yes it does. I'll accept your quote of 2MW for $3.5 million as a working base. The expansion at Mt. Piper is for 2000MW at a cost of $2.5 - 5 billion so to match that with wind would require 1,000 turbines and cost $3.5 billion. However that is based on "Nameplate Power" and not actual "Capacity Power". Wind in general seems to run at about 25% of Nameplate power, quite a bit less in some areas. So to equal the guaranteed 24/7 output of a 2000MW coal station is going to require 4,000 2 MW wind turbines, bringing the build costs up to $14 billion. So just comparing the build cost to the worst case for the Mt. Piper expansion, coal is $9 billion cheaper. Since the coal plant will use 5 million tonnes of coal per year at $100/tonne, the difference in build price alone will pay for 18 years worth of coal supplies.

I can agree that since wind is "free" there are no fuel costs, but I can't agree about maintainence costs. These are well known for coal and not so well known for wind. There is also the difference in the engineering. Coal, gas and hydro are all "ground level" operations where you can (to a degree) overengineer. You don't really want to be stripping the suckers down all that often so an extra 10 tonnes of weight in the bearings doesn't matter. They are built big and solid and except for the generator shaft itself total weight is not a consideration, this is not true for wind turbines, as they must be lifted to a height total weight is important. From an engineering standpoint they are far more "delicate". Put simply a delicate mechanism operating under variable weather conditions at 3,000 RPM will fail more often than a solid mechanism operating under reasonably constant conditions at 3,000 RPM. Also, as I noted above, in a ground based power station if there is a major problem you just turn it off and once cool get into it with tools. With wind you first need to organise a crane, a crew and a truck to take the thing away and then wait for a day when it is safe to hoist the thing down, a far more complex operation. Anything above a "grease and oil change" is a costly and complex job with wind, not so with ground based systems.

I've often thought wind would be a lot better if we could find a good way to get the blade torque down to ground level. That way the generator and gearbox are on the ground and far easier to service and could be more robustly engineered. It's the weight of the armature of the generator that is dependent on the wind torque, not the weight of the total unit so on the ground you can beef up the unit around the same armature. This is why I tend to prefer this sort of wind power design over the standard ones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Qs2gFlt-o&feature=related

It's not ready yet, but I think it's the way to go.

Backups and storage. Yes we do have some, at hydro dams. Hydro only supplies 17% of our power on the national grid. Start replacing the coal stations with wind and backups become a real problem. If wind supplied say, 25% of our power, what do we do when the wind doesn't blow? Without a massive increase in the number of hydro dams, we can't use them as they simply don't supply enough power ATM. Baseload power is required 24/7.

To a degree this is beside the point. The question is if you want to reduce pollution and get a good bang for your buck, what is a sensible and economical plan? Do you spend your money on "If, Maybe, When" ideas that might reduce CO2 emissions 20 years from now, or spend it on proven technology that will reduce emissions almost immediately? If you're really serious, which road do you take? If your car has a problem, do you fix it now or wait until you can buy a new car?

None of the above is to say that we shouldn't research and invest in other sources of energy. I simply think that upgrading to use the best and most efficient power sources should be done at the same time. To me it makes sense to always try to have the most efficient power generation possible, if it gets the AGW crowd onside, so much the better. I would add (speaking Australo-politically) that I haven't believed for years that power generation was about the environment, if it was the "nuclear option" would at least be allowed to be discussed. It is not. I see a possible future where we are driven back to horse and buggy while the rest of the world trundles along quite happily powered by their fusion reactors.

The fact that you would jump to such a sweeping conclusion based on a single paper makes it quite clear to me that you have little or no formal science education!

That's the best you can do? Borderline ad hom?

Is that how you normally react to people who ask you to actually back up what you say?

You've made it plainly obvious to all that you are interested in neither discussion nor facts, but only wish to be able to repeat any concept that comes your way without fear of contradiction. If that's what you want I suggest you go back to the "Bob Brown Fan Club", you won't last long here. Try the local office of the "Greens", you can have a nice herbal tea and expound sagely to others who will simply nod, agree and continue their circle jerk.

I'm done here.

Sounds really odd, doesn't it?

I came across the link for this elsewhere and had a read, the guy makes sense. Not just for Australia, but for many other developed nations.

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/co2-emissions-reduction-a-radical-plan/

Down here we are looking at a rather nasty tax, plus programs with the idea of 5-10% reductions. The whole deal will cost a not small fortune.

Now a heck of a lot of the CO2 and other pollutants are from burning coal. Big power stations (old ones) burn 6.5 - 8 million tons per year, but new versions are far more efficient and burn around 5 million tons per year. While I'm sceptical about how much warming might come from CO2, I just can't see a downside with this idea.

If people are worried about CO2, it will reduce emissions by more than most of the cap and trade or other options I've seen. There is the reduction in general pollutants and the savings. Coal is trading AU$120/tonne, for a power station to save (using the minimum figures) 1.5 million tonnes per year is a saving of AU$180 million per year in operating costs.

It's also a lot cheaper to build a new coal fired station than the equivalent in Solar or Wind. How many wind turbines to generate 1000MW? And you still need a back up station if the wind fails.

I can't find an obvious problem with his figures and think that this sort of idea is something that both warmer and sceptic could and should support.

The other creepy thing is that after living there for many years it still seemed to me as though everyone I knew, from strangers to friends to girlfriends, was perpetually projecting some distorted self-image or pretending to be someone they weren't. It was as if you couldn't shake them loose from their constant pretense of being someone to get them actually just to be someone.

Actually this brings up something I've been told and would like the germans here to comment on.

To give a bit of background, I was a project manager in the Exhibition industry (trade shows, expos, that sort of thing) and we often had german backpackers working for us. One day we were talking about differences they had noticed and the "High Vis" shirts and vests we wore got mentioned. They said a big difference between Germany and Australia is that we think nothing of wearing our high vis gear to and from work and will quite happily wear it to the pub for a drink after work, whereas in Germany people would change out of their uniforms to go home. Where we think nothing of walking into a pub in safety shirt and steel cap boots, a german would "rather not".

They said it was like a status thing, not letting the strangers around you know that you work with your hands or have a more "manual" job.

This seems so odd to me that I've never been sure whether or not they were pulling my leg. Could those with experience comment please?

An areas of science that are well established and widly accepted this becomes just silly.

Firstly you haven't shown in any way that this idea is "well established and widely accepted". Secondly your argument is a logical fallacy. "Appeal to belief". This is about science and it doesn't matter what people believe or how many accept it, evidence and proof is all that matters. If the idea that ecological balance is so widespread and so widely accepted, then it should be extremely easy to provide some sort of proof, but you don't do so, all you do is repeat yourself.

The onus is not on me to provide proof but on you to do the background reading and therefore ask sensible and worth while questions.

Second logical fallacy. "Burden of Proof". You have made the claim, the burden is on you to prove it, not on me to investigate.

There is clearly some interaction between the two populations given that their numbers closely mirror each other at least some of the time.

Third logical fallacy. "Ignoring a common cause". I note also that you either don't know (were you sick the day they taught Methodology 101?) or are ignoring the basic scientific principle, "Correlation does not prove causation".

Rubbish! The study also states that such closed and contrived laboratory conditions lack the stability of real world systems due to the lack of complexity. But until they do collapse it clearly demonstrates the coupling between predator and prey numbers.

The study doesn't say that at all. It posed a question using a very important word.

The question then arose: why are predator-prey cycles in nature apparently stable, while laboratory cultures quickly collapse?

Note the word "apparently", meaning "appear to be". Now it could be that ecologies in the wild are stable and that this is due to the greater complexity, or it could be that they are not, but appear to be from our limited perspective. (To borrow from physics, time is always constant to the subject, but is infinitely variable to the observer depending on relative velocities.)

The thing is that in an ideal world with ideal conditions, I would actually agree with you, the numbers should find some sort of balance, that seems only logical. But this is the real world and it doesn't have ideal conditions and so they don't. Nature is not constrained by what we humans consider logical or right. Nature does what it damn well wants to regardless of our theories and ideas. Ecologies are obviously strongly coupled non linear systems, to attempt to reduce them to simple linear relationships is just ludicrous.

Look JohnB I prefer to accept what the vast majority of the biological community says about predator-prey relationships rather than accept your personal opinion and interpretations on the subject. You sound far to like Andrew Bolt on the subject of climate change for me to consider you as credible.

I'm not asking you to accept my "personal opinion and interpretations" on the subject, you are asking me to accept yours. All I'm doing is asking for proof that you are correct, something that even though you keep saying is easy, you are flat out refusing to do. As to Bolt, who gives a tinkers damn what he might or might not think on a totally different subject? Your fourth logical fallacy for that post. "Guilt by Association".

Greg, this is a science forum and deals with evidence and proof, not hearsay. Nobody is exempt not even the mods. "Nullius in Verba".

Damn but that was a good post iNow, easy to read and informative.

While I'm probably not as Keynsian as you are, your arguments make sense and I'd like to see them expanded and debated.

The only (minor) quibble I see is the bit about paying for more pharma for the elderly. Isn't the problem there that Medicare (Medicaid?) isn't allowed to negotiate for cheaper bulk buying prices? Or do I have that wrong?

JohnB I am making statements about widely accepted ecological theory.

Yes, you are. However this is the internet and why should I or anybody else take your word that this is in fact "widely accepted ecological theory"? Which is why you've been asked for proof. A chemist reading this thread has no background knowledge of biology and cannot tell whether or not your statement is correct unless you provide some evidence to back it up. This is the point that you are missing. Repeating that something is "widely accepted" means nothing without proof.

This started when I challenged the idea of "ecological balance" and provided arguments that it doesn't actually exist. The lynx/hare thing came up to demonstrate the predator/prey relationship but it's been shown that the two populations are so far apart that there can be no causal relationship between the two sets of numbers. I provided a peer reviewed paper that said as much. Whether the lynx might or might not eat something else as well is beside the point, the lynxes are 1,500 miles from the hares. You simply cannot use the data to support a causal predator/prey relationship.

When you finally provided some "proof" it was to a webpage that uses as it's first example of Predation Theory, the now known to be wrong lynx/hare data. So that part fails to make the case in favour of the concept of "ecological balance" or cyclic predation theory.

The second example on the page was an experiment using Paramecium and to quote from the page;

Paramecium, which also proved useful in test-tube studies of competition, was placed in culture with a predaceous protozoan. These laboratory studies found that cycles were short-lived, and the system soon collapsed.

So rather than finding an "ecological balance", the system collapsed. The only way to make the results match the "logic and mathematical theory" was to interfere with the system and keep adding prey. This experiment, rather than supporting your ideas directly opposes it.

The assumption of the page is this;

Logic and mathematical theory suggest that when prey are numerous their predators increase in numbers, reducing the prey population, which in turn causes predator number to decline. The prey population eventually recovers, starting a new cycle.

Yet it doesn't provide any proof at all of the actual existence of the predation cycle in nature. The lynx/hare data is bogus, the simple experiment collapsed and the complex experiment discussed later collapsed after 4 cycles.

Going to the "Summary" section we see again;

Mathematical models and logic suggests that a coupled system of predator and prey should cycle: predators increase when prey are abundant, prey are driven to low numbers by predation, the predators decline, and the prey recover, ad infinitum.

However data shows that this is not what happens and this is accepted by the comment;

Some simple systems do cycle, particularly those of the boreal forest and tundra, although this no longer seems the rule.

Note that no evidence is present to actually confirm the first part of this statement. The disconnect between models and reality is explained by;

In complex systems, alternative prey and multi-way interactions probably dampen simple predator-prey cycles.

This might be true, or it might just be an opinion. Some actual proof would be nice. Yes, I did notice where the page is from, I'm assuming it's a basic summary page for the course taught there. Unfortunately, being a summary of the course doesn't make it proof, especially when it's using flawed data to make its case.

I am sure that I could come up with a few tens of thousands of other reputable sources telling you the exact same thing! Both on the web and in university libraries.

Then would you mind finding one or two? So far all you've shown is that courses in ecology continue to use bad data 17 years after it has been shown to be bad, and that rather than finding an "ecological balance" predator/prey systems collapse. Neither of which is helping your case.