August 2024 – The Saltbush Club

Eat your Veg, and Save the Planet!

By Dr Graham Pinn

After reaching an impasse with fossil-fuel bans, the COP 28 conference in Dubai, moved on to a new climate and life-threatening target; the latest activists’ mission, to save the planet, is to stop us eating meat. It is apparently a win/win, with less land required for animal husbandry, and reduced methane output from cows. The conference, coming from the desert sands, discretely failed to mention that camels, although not ruminants like cows, have multiple stomachs and also produce large amounts of methane.

This development is now being inappropriately incorporated into the National Health and Medical Research (NHMRC) official guidelines, on the grounds of environmental sustainability, rather than human development; the NHMRC has no mandate to involve itself in environmental issues.

Green Foods Fail Olympics

By Viv Forbes

The first occupants of the Olympics village in Paris quickly taught the caterers that athletes did not favour their “climate-friendly” diet of things like avocados on toast plus almond-milk coffee. The athletes demanded more meat and eggs.

Paris Olympics CEO, Etienne Thobois, told reporters they suddenly needed more animal protein, causing them to order “700 kilos of eggs and a ton of meat, to meet the demands of the athletes.”

The Olympic caterers should have read a bit of French history – Vikings brought cattle to Normandy in the 10th century and valued them for both meat and milk.

The Paris organisers could also have also looked at some French cave paintings, such as the one in Lascaux, which depict aurochs, the ancestor of domestic cattle, being attacked by ancient hunters

by Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay: Hunting for Meat in the Stone Age

The Normans took their love of beef to Britain. In 1611 King James knighted his loin roast so it could be worthy item on a King’s table – since then it has been known as “sirloin”.

Snowy 2.0 Digging into Debt

By John McRobert

Into the valley of debt rode the encumbered. Kamala-nomics is already being practised in the land Down-Under. ‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’ can only explain the news that Snowy 2.0 has ordered another tunnelling machine, at a probable cost of over $100m – for delivery hopefully next year – hopefully in time to help the struggling boring machine, Florence reach the fault zone. Who knows what will happen then? The price has already escalated from $2b to $12b, and no one mentions another $10b or so for transmission lines. Shareholders of a private company faced with such an appalling record of expenditure with no guarantee the project can be completed without more calls for funds, would have pulled the plug long ago.

If and when it is completed, if some water is available during drought, if there is surplus power from unreliable energy sources, and if enough water has been pumped to the top of the hill, there will be sufficient hydro-power for three million homes – for a week. Then the battery runs flat. Forget the needs of industry. Forget living standards. Or spend the money maintaining and upgrading our coal-fired power stations. The climate won’t even notice.

The SunCable Gambit

By John McRobert

Refreshing to read Nick Cater’s exposé of the SunCable gambit ‘Sun sets on renewables superpower fantasy’ (The Australian, 26/8/2024). The ‘green tick’ given to the project had the usual weasel-word caveats of strict conditions to completely avoid important species such as the greater bilby and critical habitat. But clearing and cladding with imported glass panels 12,000-hectares of land, would be more devastating to native wildlife and ecosystems than a wildfire, and with far greater long-term damage inflicted on the landscape and our economy.

One might ask what has this fanciful project already cost the Australian taxpayer in subsidies and so-called ‘carbon credits’?

Welcome the Warmth

By Viv Forbes

At dawn today (30^th July) mid-winter in sunny Queensland, it was zero degrees on the lawn outside our kitchen and the small water tub for our chooks was iced over.

Every morning, as soon as it gets light, Judy puts a winter coat over her jamas, adds gloves, glasses, rubber boots, a beanie and a walking stick (icy grass is very slippery). She then trudges down the hill to check any new-born lambs and then lets the sheep out of their dingo-proof night-camp into their paddock for the day. As soon as they are let out, they dribble into a long line and, led by the wisest old ewe, they wend their way across the frosty flat and then make their way up the hill to the highest point facing the morning sun.

The chronology of the Climate Change / Global Warming debate

By R. G. McKellar

Early Science.

The Swedish chemist Arrhenius published a significant advance toward the mathematical treatment of global climate in a paper published in 1896. Until that time the dynamics of a rotating planet with the familiar passing of daylight into night had defied scientists. Aarhenius devised a simplified model with the surface area of the Earth converted to a flat disc receiving solar energy at the rate of one-quarter of the incoming flux at the equator (at the equinox). All temperatures were treated as global averages—-a very difficult thing to do when most stations recording temperature were in the northern hemisphere & on land. The method employed an Ideal Atmosphere, which unfortunately did not include water vapour. Water vapour, by its volume, is the most important Greenhouse gas, and by its phase changes solid>liquid>gas>liquid>solid>gas, heat is extracted or released into the atmosphere.

Currently, all computer models use Arrhenius’ basic maths. Aarhenius arrived at the conclusion that there would be a welcome 3-4 degrees C of European warming in the 20^th century—-a very high estimate ( versus ~1degreeC later observed), and much like that coming out of climate models from various universities and meteorological offices to this day. Interestingly, Aarhenius in a 1906 paper did acknowledge the importance of water vapour, but that was subsequently over-looked .

Olympic Dam’s Gold Medal Performance

By Bob Day

It is exactly 50 years since Western Mining first discovered the massive gold, silver, copper and uranium ore body at the aptly-named Olympic Dam in South Australia. A golden anniversary indeed!

But discovering the ore was just the beginning.

The fight to allow uranium mining at Olympic Dam was brutal.

The ruling Labor Party, under then SA Premier Don Dunstan, was vehemently opposed to uranium mining and particularly opposed to uranium mining at Olympic Dam.

Canton Cabbage or China Revisited

By Howard Dewhirst

After memories of WWII began to fade, Australians began to drift away from the mother country’s culinary habits, from meat and two veg, beans on toast and spam and chips to more exotic dishes such as Canton Cabbage. Almost every town of any size had a Chinese restaurant and a Greek café, and little else that was ‘exotic’. However, when Mao united China under his northern umbrella, Peking, the Cantonese name for the city, was replaced by the Mandarin language Beijing, and Canton became Guangzhou, even though Cantonese is its inhabitant’s first language. So, now that Canton is no more, do we need a new name for this exotic dish?

While naming places is China’s business, there is an argument that we do not need to change our language to please others, as some have done, witness the recent fad of spelling the English name of Turkey in the Turkish script as Tűrkiyé, because that’s what their President wants. Would you believe that two of the letters he is insisting we use, are not in our alphabet? Yes, I can import them on my PC or iPhone, but why should I?

LABOR PRIME MINISTERS BEN CHIFLEY AND BOB HAWKE SUPPORTED NUCLEAR POWER… AND SO DOES UK’S NEW SOCIALIST PRIME MINISTER

By Cliff Reece

In 1947, the Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Ben Chifley (pictured above left next to Bob Hawke) – famous for his ‘The Light on the Hill’ speech, which has resonated down the years as epitomising the Labor philosophy – first guided the thinking of Australians towards nuclear power.

The establishment of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission was well on the way when the Chifley Government was defeated in 1948.

At no stage during the earlier years of the Labor Party were they against nuclear technology. The Uranium-Australian Policy which was formulated by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) during those years included the following: