National Geographic - Alejandra Borunda
The ocean soaks up 93 percent of the heat of climate change. But that heat has a big and long-lasting impact.
The Arctic Ocean in Barrow, Alaska in June 2015, after the warmest winter on record in Alaska.
Photograph by KATIE ORLINSKY, Nat Geo Image Collection
Earth’s oceans are warmer now than at any point since humans started
systematically tracking their temperatures, according to research
published on January 16 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
The oceans have sopped up more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by
human-emitted greenhouse gases, slowing the warming of the
atmosphere—but causing many other unwelcome changes to the planet’s
climate.
Even a slightly warmer ocean can have dramatic impacts. Other new research shows that warmer oceans make waves stronger. Warmer waters fuel stronger storms, increasing the damage that hurricanes and tropical storms inflict. The added warmth hurts coral habitats and stresses fisheries. Around Antarctica, yet another new study suggests,
ice is melting about six times faster than it was in the 1980s—an
increase due in part to the warmer waters lapping at the continent’s
edge.
“The oceans are the best thermometer we have for the planet,” says Zeke Hausfather,
an energy and climate scientist at the University of California,
Berkeley, who used the ocean heat data published today in an analysis
published last week in Science. “We can really see global warming loud and clear in the ocean record.”
Antarctica Is Melting at a Dangerous Pace—Here's Why
Missing heat is now found
As early as the 1800s, scientists suspected that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would cause air temperatures around the planet to rise.
By the 1960s, once they started keeping careful track of both air
temperatures and carbon dioxide levels around the world, their
predictions were borne out.
The atmosphere didn’t seem
to be warming quite as much as model calculations indicated it should,
however. Where could the extra heat be going?
Some oceanographers suspected that the “missing” heat was being
absorbed into the oceans—but measuring that heat was much harder than
measuring air temperatures. Although research ships crossing the ocean
would occasionally dip a probe into the water to test the temperature,
those data were tiny blips in the wide expanse of the sea.
So scientists pulled together all data they could find, from
observations from commercial ships to naval data to historical records.
And when all that was compiled, the scientists realized that the oceans
were, in fact, acting as an enormous buffer for the climate system, like
a giant pillow softening the hard landing of climate change.
In the last decade, measurements of the ocean's heat content have
been improved dramatically by a new tool: Some 3,000 autonomous sensors,
called Argo floats, have been scattered around the ocean. They
regularly record temperatures in the top 6,500 feet of the water column
and have immensely improved the quality of the data scientists have to
work with for these estimates.
Thanks to those measurements, it's now clear that the oceans are
absorbing some 90 percent of the heat our carbon emissions have trapped
in the atmosphere—the most recent estimate, published last week, pegs
that number at 93 percent. If all the heat the ocean absorbed from 1955
onward were suddenly added to the atmosphere, air temperatures would
rocket by more than 60 degrees.
In other words, the oceans are acting as a giant thermal buffer,
protecting us from feeling all the heat of climate change directly. But
the heat isn't going away.
The warming is speeding up
In 2018, the entire top slice of the ocean, from the surface down
6,500 feet, was warmer than ever before, just over one tenth of a degree
Celsius warmer overall than the long-term average. Even that tiny bump
was enough to nudge sea levels about an eight of an inch higher, simply
because warmer water takes up more space.
But 2018 caps off nearly three decades of smooth, consistent warming, the cumulative results of which can be felt more keenly.
“The warming seems small on a day-to-day basis, but it adds up over time,” says Kevin Trenberth,
a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Colorado and an author of today’s report. The extra energy pooling in
the atmosphere slowly percolates into the ocean, and “and that’s why we
keep breaking records year after year,” he says.
More alarmingly, over those last few decades, oceans warmed nearly 40
percent faster than they did in the middle of the last century, say the
authors of the Science analysis from last week.
Since the Industrial Revolution, says Laure Zanna, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who recently inventoried the ocean's growing absorption
of extra heat, the amount of extra energy trapped in the ocean as a
result of our greenhouse gas emissions is about 1,000 times as great as
the amount of the energy humans use each year, worldwide.
What happens now lasts centuries
There’s essentially no limit to how much more heat from the
atmosphere the oceans can absorb: they’re huge and deep. But the ocean
has a long memory, and the heat it sucks up now will be stuck in the
system for hundreds or even thousands of years: The ghost of a cold
phase from a few hundred years ago in the North Atlantic is still
floating through the world’s oceans, a study published in Science in early January showed.
So the decisions we make now will affect us far into the future, says Susan Wijffels,
an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod.
“The ability of the deep ocean to take up heat on that very long
timescale is great. But it's also locking in a commitment in the
system,” she says. So even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases
tomorrow, the ocean will continue to warm for centuries—and will take
even longer to shed the extra heat.
The effects, say the authors of the new heat assessment, are likely
to disrupt both marine physics and marine life. Warmer oceans hold less
oxygen, which could hurt biota from plankton to whales. A warmer baseline temperature makes the likelihood of marine heat waves more likely, like the one that swept through the waters off northeast China last summer, ruining the sea cucumber harvest
across the shallow seas. Zanna and her colleagues also see evidence
that the major currents that carry heat and nutrients around the ocean
are changing.
The full magnitude of the changes will take hundreds of years to play out, Wijffels says.
“Every molecule of CO2
that we don’t put into the atmosphere now is saving us from warming
potential in the future,” she says. “This really drives home that we
need to reduce emissions now, as much as we can.”
If the battle for hearts and minds over climate change is to be won, simply being right is not enough.
The actions of then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt generated many protests, such as this one in New York in June 2018.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Setting up an information-based
“inoculation” program may be an effective way of combating the
deliberately misleading messages of the fossil fuel industry and its
representatives, researchers say.
In a detailed essay in the journal Nature Climate Change,
Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell from Yale University, and Robert
Brulle from Brown University, both in the US, explore strategies that
scientists and advocacy bodies can employ to ensure evidence, rather
than ideology and financial self-interest, once more informs
environmental and climate policy. Key
to this approach is the brutal realisation that there is no value in
climate scientists and advocates simply repeating that the evidence is
overwhelming and irrefutable, even though it is. It is not sufficient to
have faith in the ultimate triumph of the good guys.
“It
is not enough simply to communicate to the public over and again the
scientific consensus on human-caused climate change,” the authors write.
“Nor
is it ultimately effective to repeatedly engage in scientific debate
with industry-funded scientists … or political pundits, hoping to debunk
their spurious findings so that the public will finally see the light.
“Because,
paradoxically, the partisan divide on climate change grew most rapidly
at the very point at which the scientific community became virtually
unanimous in its conclusions about the reality and risks of
anthropogenic climate change.”
Climate change contrarians, and
policy based on their industry-funded positions, at least in the US, are
very much in the ascendant. Farrell and colleagues cite examples such
as the decision by then-director of the Environmental Protection
Authority Scott Pruitt to dramatically cut research – a position
publicly advocated by coal industry lobbyist Steve Milloy, who called it
“one of my proudest achievements”.
Milloy and Pruitt are just two
of a host of people who in recent years have come to exert enormous
influence on US policy – but dismissing them as hopelessly compromised
buffoons, the authors caution, is a mistake.
“Many, especially
climate scientists who have seen the evidence of warming first hand,
wondered how we had reached this point,” they reflect.
“How had
these once fringe actors, who tended to be overlooked and at times even
laughed off as irrelevant bloggers, managed to embed their ideas so
deeply into mainstream US politics?
“And how, over the course of
the 1990s and 2000s, did half of the American public — and the large
majority of the Republican Party and its supporters — increasingly lose
trust in, and become so antagonistic towards, robust scientific facts
with such dire consequences?”
Farrell and colleagues quickly
answer their own question, taking two approaches.
First, they note a
growing body of research that finds that evidence-integrity is only one
of a range of factors that condition whether scientific studies are
believed. Matters such as a person’s religious and political beliefs,
ideas about the role of scientists, and trust – or absence thereof – in
mainstream media outlets weigh heavily.
Second, they outline the
careful and controlled strategies employed by the fossil fuel industry,
the parliamentarians who accept funding therefrom, and the web of PR
agencies and lobbyists paid by them to sow discord, division and
uncertainty into the public discourse.
Much of this, they note, revolves around, pushing “scientific
misinformation [that] can seem to be so accurate and reliable, or even
part of a legitimate ‘grassroots’ movement”.
This is achieved, in
large part, “via various communication channels, including academic
journals, policy papers, press briefings, steering the media towards
‘false-balance’ coverage under the guise of presenting ‘both sides’ of
an alleged ‘scientific debate’, personal attacks against prominent
climate scientists and advertising to reach targeted audiences”.
Taking the need to counter this activity as self-evident, the writers explore four inter-related strategies.
Two
of these, perhaps not surprisingly, involve using legal and political
avenues – the first to expose, and thus devalue, the ties between
industry and climate change contrarians, the second to better highlight
positive developments such as large corporate and advocacy bodies
divesting themselves of fossil fuel industry holdings, for either
economic or ethical reasons.
The third approach, linked to the
first two, revolves around financial transparency. It works on the
assumption that exposing the complex financial arrangements between fuel
companies and lobbyists will lessen the impact of the messages
delivered.
The fourth, though, takes it start from public health
policy and, if it works, has the potential to be self-sustaining. The
writers term the strategy “public inoculation” or “vaccination”. The
idea – backed up, they say, by some small-scale studies – works
“against misinformation by exposing people to a dose of refuted
arguments before they hear them”.
“Similar to how a vaccine
builds antibodies to resist a virus a person might encounter,
attitudinal inoculation messages warn people that misinformation is
coming, and arm them with a counter-argument to resist that
misinformation.”
One approach to this, the writers suggest,
involves making sure people hear that particular climate change
contrarian messages – and messengers – are funded by coal corporations
before they encounter them. Early research,
they note, has found that this method works on people from a wide range
of backgrounds, and might thus be effective in breaking down political
or religious opposition. However, they add, these are early days in the attitudinal vaccination business.
“Inoculating
the public may be an especially promising strategy for heading off
misinformation campaigns before they take root, but future research on
inoculation is needed to assess whether or not — and precisely how —
this practice can be extended beyond experimental settings and applied
more broadly to build up resistance to misinformation within large
segments of the public,” they write.
Farrell and colleagues
conclude that they are “hopeful” their suggested quartet of strategies
“will prove to be successful in the long run”.
Many people,
disheartened by current policy directions in the US, as well as in
several other countries, including Australia, might feel that such hope
is more quixotic than rational.
The writers, however, present
their case with a sense of urgency, and a confidence that their approach
will produce results “not only for turning the tide on the critical
issue of climate change action, but also for preventing future cases of
large-scale manipulation from taking root”.
Legal actions
are based on the principle that governments must meet their obligations
under human rights law and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change
Environmental activists gather to urge
world leaders to take action against climate change in Marseille,
France, September 8, 2018. The placard reads No nature no future.
REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier
BARCELONA - Environmentalists in France and Ireland are pushing
forward with legal cases aimed at forcing their governments to step up
action on climate change, motivated by a 2018 flagship ruling that the
Netherlands must cut emissions faster to keep its people safe.
In October, a Dutch appeals court
said the government had "done too little to prevent the dangers of
climate change and is doing too little to catch up", ordering it to
ensure planet-warming emissions are at least 25 percent below 1990
levels by the end of 2020.
Tessa Khan, a lawyer with the Urgenda Foundation which brought the
Dutch case on behalf of nearly 900 citizens, said this and other ongoing
climate legal actions are based on the principle that governments must
meet their obligations under human rights law and the 2015 Paris
Agreement on climate change.
"(These cases) all spring from the same sort of inspiration and the
broad notion that our governments have the duty to protect us from
threats of this scale that they have contributed to knowingly," said
Khan, who is co-director of the Climate Litigation Network.
In France, four non-governmental groups, including Greenpeace and Oxfam, fired the starting gun on Dec. 17.
They sent a "preliminary request for compensation" in a 41-page
letter to the French prime minister and a dozen government ministers,
denouncing the state for failing to take concrete and effective measures
to combat climate change.
The government has two months to respond, and if it fails to give a
satisfactory answer, the groups are preparing to file a full legal
action with the Paris Administrative Court in March.
Armelle Le Comte, climate and energy advocacy manager at Oxfam
France, said the ripple of lawsuits on climate action around the world -
from Europe and North America to Pakistan and Colombia - reflected
growing urgency as the impacts of extreme weather and rising seas become
more visible.
Governments, including France, have talked a lot about tackling climate change, but have not done enough in practice, she noted.
"So I think it is not surprising that more citizens, charities and
NGOs ... decide that legal action is maybe the answer," she said.
Celebs on camera
In the meantime, the NGOs have been raising awareness about the case
and the need for stronger climate action in France through a YouTube
video featuring celebrities such as actress Juliette Binoche, and writer
and film director Cyril Dion.
They also launched an online petition in support of what they are
calling the "Case of the Century" that has garnered nearly 2.1 million
signatures in about a month.
Le Comte said wide public support for the legal action was important in providing a sense of legitimacy to the approach.
The case is particularly poignant in France, which has been rocked in
recent months by "yellow vest" protests over social inequality and the
high cost of living that were initially sparked by planned hikes in fuel
tax.
French President Emmanuel Macron launched a national policy debate
this week that includes how the country could shift to using more clean
energy.
Urgenda's Khan said the court cases were aimed at ensuring emissions targets are met, not telling states how to do it.
"Then it's up to the governments and the public to make sure the
policies that are put in place are ones that ensure a just (energy)
transition and ... the poorest aren't the ones who bear the burden of
that transition," she said.
Oxfam's Le Comte said the "Case of the Century" social media campaign
was meant to provide more information, especially to young people, on
the measures that could be taken.
Irish emissions rise
In Ireland, backers of the climate change case, scheduled to begin in
the High Court on Jan. 22, are organising a children's rally in Dublin
on Saturday to urge leaders that "2019 must be the year of ambitious
climate action".
About 12,600 members of the public have backed "Climate Case Ireland"
with online messages of support. Spokeswoman Sadhbh O Neill said
awareness was growing in the country which has among the highest
emissions per capita in the European Union.
"That helps us show the court that we have standing, that we're not
doing it in a self-interested way and that we are trying to be
representative of concerned citizens," she told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.
Friends of the Irish Environment, a company set up by environmental
activists, will argue in the case that the government's approval of the
National Mitigation Plan in 2017 violated national legislation on
climate action, as well as its constitution and human rights
obligations.
It will also claim the plan falls far short of the steps required by the Paris Agreement.
O Neill noted that Ireland's emissions had risen since 2014, as its
economy recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and its dairy industry
expanded. They dropped back slightly in 2017, government figures show.
A spokesman for Ireland's Department of Communications, Climate
Action and Environment said by email that the government would defend
the case, but noted the National Mitigation Plan recognised a detailed
roadmap would be required to decarbonise the economy.
That is now being put in place, he added, and includes a
government-wide climate action plan "intended to make Ireland a leader
in responding to climate disruption".
The verdict in the Irish case, a judicial review, is expected to be
issued in a few months, while the French legal process could last two to
three years, Le Comte said.
In the Netherlands, it took three years for an initial ruling to be
confirmed by the appeals court, and the government said in November it
would request a review of the judgement.
Khan said one key advantage of pursuing states in court was judicial scrutiny of the evidence on climate change.
"Just by putting the facts on the record - that in itself is a really
important communication tool, and helps to mobilise the public around
climate change," she said.
Any halfway decent political opportunist would use this week's images
of dead and dying Murray cod and other fish in the Menindee Lakes to
put the environment and climate change at the forefront of the election
campaign. The fact that the weather has been warmish, even by Goodooga
standards, doesn't do any harm either.
The images have an emotive
energy often lacking in many of the impassioned debates about places we
care about which are fairly far away, and which have become almost
abstractions for the feeling that we ought to be doing something – at
the very least, something more than we have been doing.
Thousands of fish have died at the Menindee Weir Pool.
Straight
off, the dead and stinking fish could symbolise the mismanagement,
maladministration and corruption of water policy in Queensland, NSW and
Victoria. It doesn't take a great deal of extension to work it into an
argument about the National Party's intellectual and moral bankruptcy,
particularly under former leader Barnaby Joyce, and its complete
unfitness to govern. Rural folk increasingly feel that way, wondering
how a party established to represent rural and regional Australians
became instead available for rent to big mining interests, the coal
industry, the fracking industry and large-scale agribusiness,
particularly when these interests threaten their livelihoods.
But
the Nationals are only the obvious culprits. Look, for example, at
Malcolm Turnbull, who had a spell as minister in charge of saving the
Murray and Darling river systems a bit more than a decade ago, and knew
so much about the topic that he and John Howard were able to concoct a
river water policy, costing billions of dollars, on the back of an
envelope over a couple of afternoons, without even feeling the need to
consult the Treasury, which, Turnbull said contemptuously, knew nothing
about the subject.
One
of the many things that Turnbull learned during his period as water
flâneur in chief was the wisdom of successive conservative prime
ministers in keeping water policy out of the hands of Nationals
ministers. Not even Tony Abbott was tempted to hand it over – probably
on the advice of former senator Bill Heffernan, a farmer with some
tolerance for human weakness but never for waste or mismanagement of a
scarce water supply. After Turnbull knifed Abbott, to general applause,
Joyce popped around to remind him that Coalition agreements were between
leaders, not parties, and that continuing the alliance would need to
involve some Liberal concessions. When Turnbull announced his ministry,
water was with Joyce at agriculture, and that department further refined
its habit of looking away and doing nothing when policy became
imperial, and when enforcement of the law, or even implementation of it,
came to be regarded as a matter of discretion.
But one does not
need to dwell long on the dead fish to think also of climate change, and
the Morrison government's inertia on the subject, not least because a
good proportion of the Coalition doesn't actually believe in it or, at
least, in doing anything brave or courageous, or ahead of anybody else,
about it. And also of drought, and extreme weather, neither in the least
bit unusual in the Australian environment, but both seeming to come
more regularly, and with solid evidence of increasing averages. Perhaps
the population is not completely certain about what to do to ward off
the effects of climate change, and how much of whatever it is is
necessary, but opinion polls suggest that most Australians believe we
should do a good deal more, and with a more explicit sense of urgency,
than the present government.
Some of the thousands of dead fish in the Darling River near Menindee. Credit:Nick Moir
One
does not have to segue far off the dead fish, the drought or climate
change theme to think of the Great Barrier Reef, and the threat posed to
it by rising temperatures, caused not least by coal. The government's
response to this crisis appears to involve enabling (if not yet
financing, though it may come to that) a large coal-mining project
nearby, and giving nearly $500 million to a club of rich executives,
chiefly from the mining industry, who think they can commission work,
perhaps with some private sector help, that will tackle some of the
evidences of the effects of climate change, if not actually do anything
about it.
The power of the images is such that they could be
harnessed for messages against the Coalition, or for the Labor Party,
which is saying mostly the right things about climate change, if not
necessarily about water policy or Adani, or for the Greens or
environmental candidates. The fish don't need a detailed inquest: just
by themselves, they show that something has gone very badly wrong.
It
says something about the political ineptness of federal and state
Nationals ministers, including Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack,
that he insists that the fish deaths are the effects of drought rather
than policy, or of drought accompanied by abrupt changes in temperature.
No doubt these have played their part in the catastrophe but, as usual
along the Darling system, the problem is much more complicated than
that, and owes much to the overallocation of water to irrigation
farmers, particularly along the Macquarie and Barwon rivers, to the
failures of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, not least (from the
start) in failing to prioritise the environment ahead of agricultural
needs, and to rorting of the whole system, with the connivance of public
service regulators, particularly in the NSW government. That federal
ministers and some public servants in the primary industry department
see their function as facilitating agriculture and maximising its export
revenue has also led to the corruption of the public stewardship they
were supposed to deliver to the whole community.
One
reason the symbolism of the fish deaths has the power to sound in votes
is that the division of scarce resources inevitably involves rationing,
winners and losers, and people who argue about what should be rationed.
The Four Corners report last year, which showed some big
farmers stealing water, acquired some of its moral force from the fact
that the rorters were dobbed in by neighbours as well as by folk nearby.
They were angry and resentful not only because the rorters were taking
water for free while they paid for it, but because the rorting of the
supply meant a diminished total supply. That's quite apart from the fact
that many farmers are keen fishers, well-versed in their local
environments, and want to live sustainably in them, rather than by
mining its water supplies and raping the soil.
But
that's just in the immediate neighbourhood. In any river system, there
are folk upstream and downstream, particularly downstream, who will
gripe that their allocations have been reduced because too much water
has been taken upstream. They are often right, even within a state. But
there has been a long pattern of farmers within an upstream state taking
more than they should, to the ultimate disadvantage of downstream
states, particularly South Australia. That's a problem aggravated by
physical constraints, including weirs that often prevent water flowing
downstream, by very poor Commonwealth policy and management of
efficiencies to save water, and by evaporation.
Given the original
overallocations of water licences to irrigators, the Commonwealth began
buying allocations (from "willing sellers" on the water market). But
this was unpopular in some areas, with claims (by no means
substantiated) that the sale of irrigation licences was
depopulating communities and reducing their resources. The present
government prefers to spend public money subsidising farmers to increase
the efficiency of their water use, thus liberating some water for the
environment. There are problems with this approach. First, the cost of
the water "liberated" for the environment by such measures is nearly
three times that of water liberated through buying allocations on the
open market, the supposed ideal distributing mechanism. Second, the
economic benefit from the subsidised infrastructure and efficiency
mechanisms goes to the individual farmer, rather than to a district or
the public at large. In a real sense, neighbours can be economically
disadvantaged because they are unable to grow food or cotton at the cost
of the neighbours whose "investment" in better methods was heavily
subsidised.
That
has also brought to light other inequities. Last year in NSW, the
government announced measures to "borrow" water from the environmental
reservation because of the dought's severity. Listening to the blather
coming from the Nationals, one would have understood the announcement as
suggesting that some water was being liberated so farmers and graziers
could get minimal supplies for thirsty sheep, or to round off a crop
almost ready for harvest.
But
the extra water, better characterised as water stolen rather than
borrowed, was not rationed out to the needy. It was auctioned out to the
highest bidder – usually to better-off farmers not suffering as greatly
from the drought and thus in a better position to bid high. Some water,
indeed, went upstream to farmers not actually in drought at all. And
some of the crops "topped off" were not crops planned and planted as
possible from diminishing allocations as drought took hold, but extra
speculative planting, just in case there was late rain.
The
South Australian royal commission into the management of the
Murray-Darling system, being conducted by Bret Walker, SC, should soon
report. Set up in response to anger about its very junior status at the
table, it has had minimal cooperation from the Commonwealth (which
ordered that the basin authority, and its staff and board members, not
give evidence). The commission has had only token cooperation from the
states.
But that has not meant that it has been purely parochial,
or that the evidence before it has been skewed to South Australian
matters or interests. For starters, there are many players, including
irrigators and farming interests from other states, who were keen to
give evidence and to describe their problems. There have been retired
basin workers and regulators, and former CSIRO staff still angry about
how managers caved in to politicians and changed scientific calculations
of water needs to suit political agendas. There has been abundant
evidence showing the authority's setting and subsequent reduction of
sustainable environmental allocations not in response to any scientific
analysis but to calculations of what interest groups might accept. After
the interests complained about the initial determination that a minimum
3000 gigalitres of water a year was needed to meet environmental water
requirements, the authority was told to "pick a number with a '2' in
front of it". It settled for 2750 gigalitres, but despite all of the fad
words about science, accountability and transparency, has been unable,
since its establishment, to show how it arrived at either figure. Expert
advice from scientists is that the minimum environmental allocation
should have been 6900 gigalitres in an average year, that there was
Buckley's of satisfying the environmental needs with an allocation of
3000, let alone 2750.
It
is typical of the mendacity of NSW's participation in the scheme that
it came up with a rort to meet demands for a higher environmental flow.
It wants to close up the Menindee Lakes, leaving only a narrow channel
by which the water can go downstream. After all, it argues, the water in
the lakes (when it is there) only evaporates. Would it be better if,
instead, it was sent to those whingeing crow-eaters, without actually
disturbing the standard of living of NSW agribusiness upstream. Local
farmers, as well as the city of Broken Hill, which draws its water from
the lakes, are furious, some insisting that the evaporation causes local
weather in any event, but also speaking of the lakes' importance as a
wetlands site, a sanctuary for birds, a breeding place for fish (if
there are any left) and as a sieve settling some of the dirty water. The
basin does not appear to be much of a player in the argument involved,
even from its duty as the ultimate protector of the riverine
environment.
But
it seems certain that Bret Walker will hold that the then Commonwealth
solicitor-general was wrong when he advised Tony Burke, when the
authority was set up, that protecting the environment was only one aim
in basin management. Equally important were social and economic
considerations.
Walker,
and the counsel assisting the royal commission, are certain that this
interpretation is wrong. Indeed, they say that every senior
constitutional lawyer consulted shares this view. The authority is first
required to establish the basin's minimum environmental needs. Only
after that can it set allocations for irrigation, or for domestic use in
towns and elsewhere.
Walker plainly thinks the misinterpretation
of the Water Act's clear instructions has led the authority to think it
must perform some political juggling act, by which it ends up with some
solution that causes all of the vested interests least trouble. As such,
the authority has failed miserably, and compounded rather than
alleviated the rivers' problems.
The
counsel assisting, Richard Beasley, SC, has not been kind to the
authority or its board. He quoted senior international scientists who
said it was a fundamental tenet of good governance that scientists
produced facts and that government decided on values and made choices.
They were concerned that scientists in the authority felt pressured "to
trim [the facts] so that the sustainable diversion limit will be one
that is politically acceptable".
Beasley
said that if all the Murray-Darling Basin Authority had done over the
past eight years was to "trim the facts", it would be bad enough.
"But
it's worse than that. The implementation of the basin plan has been
marred by maladministration. By that I mean mismanagement by those in
charge of the task at the basin authority, its executives and its board,
and the consequent mismanagement of huge amounts of public funds. The
responsibility for that ... falls on both past and present executives of
the MDBA and its board."
There are many guilty parties, and few deserve to be spared. Fish rot from the top, it is said.
