AgForce Backs Calls For Review Of Consensus Science On Great Barrier Reef

The Guardian - Ben Smee

Exclusive: Top Queensland farmers’ group supports controversial scientist Peter Ridd’s questioning of climate science

AgForce says it agrees with Peter Ridd’s calls for Great Barrier Reef climate science ‘to be more thoroughly examined and tested’. Photograph: Photography by Mangiwau/Getty Images 

Queensland’s most influential farm lobby group, AgForce, has backed calls for a review of consensus science on the Great Barrier Reef, as the state’s agricultural sector intensifies its campaign against proposed water quality regulations.
On Friday the release of two key reports painted an alarming picture of the state of the reef. The Queensland-led water quality report – which rated the water quality at inner reefs as “poor” – highlighted the impact of land management practices that contribute to the degradation of the reef due to sediment and nutrient run-off.
The findings were released at a critical point in debate about the Queensland government’s proposed regulations, which would set variable pollution limits in separate reef catchments.
Agricultural groups say those regulations will have a significant impact on farmers; particularly graziers, sugarcane growers and tropical horticulture.
Some farmers accept the consensus science, but claim the regulations are ill thought out and will have unintended consequences for primary producers. This is also the formal position of the LNP opposition.

But increasingly, sober debate about the impact of the regulations has veered into science scepticism; pushed by the controversial scientist Peter Ridd, some of the larger peak industry bodies, backbench LNP MPs and opaque front groups.
The AgForce chief executive, Michael Guerin, in a statement to Guardian Australia sent before the release of the latest reef reports, said the organisation agreed with Ridd’s calls for the science “to be more thoroughly examined and tested”.
Last week Guardian Australia revealed that an expert panel led by the former chief scientist Ian Chubb had warned ministers that Ridd is misrepresenting robust science about the plight of the reef, and compared his claims to the strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubt about the impact of smoking.
Guerin said there “was no absolute consensus” on the reef.
“We are not scientists and have no position on the science. However, when eminent reef scientists call into question the research conducted by their peers, we as a community would be foolish not to listen.
“We are simply asking the government to make sure of the science before it implements such momentous changes with potentially devastating consequences for so many.”
The AgForce general president and ABC board member Georgie Somerset will speak at a protest rally of famers in Townsville on Tuesday to coincide with a sitting of the state parliament. The event is being promoted by the opaque front organisation Farmers United, with flyers quoting Ridd and featuring the AgForce logo.
The industry argues regulation is not necessary, and that “best management practice” measures, led by agricultural groups and funded by government, were the best method to address water quality issues. Earlier this year, in protest against the proposed regulations and citing privacy concerns, AgForce deleted a decade of data from its BMP database.
The Queensland environment minister, Leeanne Enoch, said on Friday that the reef water quality report showed that voluntary BMP programs were not working quickly enough, and that urgent action was needed to address the health of the reef.
“The report … shows land-based run-off still remains a problem and that urgent changes are needed if we are going to meet our targets,” Enoch said.
“The report also shows that many farmers have been doing good work to help improve the quality of run-off, but unfortunately the science is showing that uptake has not been fast enough.
“For example, we want 90% of sugarcane land across the reef catchments managed using best management practice systems by 2025. But, the results show this was happening on only 9.8% of land so far.
“Overall water quality modelling showed only a 0.3% reduction in dissolved inorganic nitrogen and a 0.5% reduction in sediment in 2017-2018 across all regions.
“This simply isn’t enough. There are also a lot of scores that are poor, or very poor.”
As large agricultural groups seek to question the science, largely on the basis of a single opinion rejected by scores of other reef scientists, questions have grown about whether they can continue to manage millions in grants allocated for reef water quality measures.
AgForce jointly manages Queensland-funded BMP programs.
AgForce last year lobbied in support of the controversial $433m federal grant to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, and at the time noted that “agricultural land is one of many factors which can affect water quality and the long term health” of the reef.
The Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson has written to the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, suggesting groups that receive reef foundation grants to improve water quality, but who otherwise seek to question the underlying science, have a conflict of interest.
He cited support for Ridd’s recent lecture tour from regional branches of the peak organisation Canegrowers.
“On the face of it, this is a conflict of interest. The activity of Queensland Canegrowers (as a subcontractor) is impairing the ability of the foundation to improve water quality in the reef.”

Links

• Great Barrier Reef outlook now 'very poor', Australian government review says
• Only 10% of sugarcane growers in reef catchment properly managing runoff
• Great Barrier Reef Authority Urges 'Fastest Possible Action' On Emissions
• Morrison Government Experts Say Australia Must 'Do More' On Climate
• ‘Sadness, Disgust, Anger’: Fear For The Great Barrier Reef Made Climate Change Feel Urgent
• Radical Climate Action 'Critical' To Great Barrier Reef's Survival, Government Body Says
• Legal Protections Urged As Science Gears Up To Aid Great Barrier Reef
• Malcolm Turnbull Asked To Front Reef Inquiry
• The Great Barrier Reef Is “In For A Rough Ride”
• Great Barrier Reef Likely To Be Hit With Another Mass Bleaching This Summer, Forecast Shows
• To Tackle Climate Change, A New U.N. Climate Report Says Put A High Price On Carbon

Spiders Are Threatened By Climate Change – And Even The Biggest Arachnophobes Should Be Worried

The Conversation - Sergio Henriques

As the world warms, male ladybird spiders are hatching too early in the year to meet a mate. MF Photo / shutterstock

Is climate change making spiders more aggressive? A recent scientific study suggests so, as the researchers link aggressiveness to tropical cyclones, events that are expected to become more frequent and powerful with climate change. 
Unsurprisingly, the findings got considerable media coverage. After all, it matches justified fears of catastrophic climate change impacts, with the unjustified fear many people have of harmless spiders.
However, I have studied these arachnids for more than 15 years and I am not too concerned about tropical cyclones making them more aggressive. It is worth worrying about spiders themselves though.
People who dislike spiders will of course be alarmed by any news of them getting more aggressive or even bigger due to climate change. But beyond the headlines, it is important to note that they might be getting bigger for a number of reasons, and that these are localised studies made on target species. Therefore warming temperatures are unlikely to impact the recorded 48,359 species globally in the same way.
In any case, a study found that people who fear spiders are more likely to view them as larger than people who do not. And as I write this article at the end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the biggest common spiders in Europe (the garden-orb-weaver, or Araneus diadematus)) is now reaching maturity, so you might just come across “large” spiders in the middle of their webs more often at this time of year.

Orb spiders: big in late summer. Sergey / shutterstock

As for aggression, the study that reportedly shows an increase with climate change only actually looked at the impact of tropical cyclones on a single species: the group-living spider (Anelosimus studiosus). Also known as the communal spider, these are often found alone or in groups of up to a few hundred individuals, and each individual is born with either an “aggressive” or “docile” behavioural type (the new study showed that after cyclones the ratio between the two would consistently change towards more aggressive colonies).Communal behaviour is fairly rare in spiders, which is why this species is so interesting to study. But it is also what makes it less representative of other spiders behaviour, and not the best model to understand climate change impact on spiders globally.
But what if you’re still worried about that one harmless species, smaller than a centimetre, potentially becoming more aggressive? In that case, it might be useful to note that aggressiveness in this context was measured as speed and number of spiders that respond to prey (who wouldn’t run to food if they were really hungry), prey-sharing efficiency and reduce wastage (aka, want not waste not), tendency to cannibalise males and eggs (desperate times call for desperate measures) and less susceptibility to infiltration by foreign spiders (aka, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t like sharing). Therefore, if you are not an insect, there is no cause for alarm – their “aggression” is not aimed at humans.

Don’t be afraid of spiders – be afraid for spiders
But, although there is no reason to be concerned about their size or aggressiveness, you should be worried about spider survival under climate change. To take one example, just last year I was researching the beautiful ladybird spider in the western Asian highlands (I’m keeping the location secret as these animals are sought after by the illegal pet trade). Where I observed the males maturing much earlier in the year than they would normally do, thanks to an unusual hot period in winter.
For them, this was a disaster.
These male ladybird spiders usually leave their nests in spring to find suitable females, but this time they would emerge into the wider world only to find no females yet available to mate, as females appear to depend on food intake to reach sexual maturity rather than wait for environmental cues, such as temperature. Like Romeo, these males died without their Juliet.

A jumping spider tucks into a mosquito. vinit thongtue / shutterstock

You should care about all this because spiders eat an astronomical amount of insects, many of which are agricultural pests or the carries of human diseases, their loss will become ours as it impacts future ecosystems.

Furthermore, although unappreciated and understudied, spiders have untapped potential to help us develop new medicine or materials with their venom or silk. You should also care because this type of impact might be particularly dire in desert dwelling animals, which already live at the threshold of what they can tolerate, so even small temperature increases and more frequent heat waves, can wipe entire populations and drastically change those ecosystems.
Which is more likely to happen in regions where losing key biocontrol agents such as spiders, might put even more pressure on crops and on the human populations disproportionately affected by climate change.
If we continue to disregard the value of these animals, not only will our fear likely cause disruption or put us in actual danger, but ignoring them now might drive them to disappear forever.
In the famous aeroplane analogy, species are compared with losing a couple of bolts that still allow the plane to fly, but as you lose more and more parts, you’re getting dangerously close to crashing. Well, spiders are part of the engine in this analogy. Wouldn’t you be worried if the aeroplane you are flying in, the spaceship we are all in, was losing engine parts in front of your eyes?

Links

• How Spiders Increase Plant Diversity
• City spiders are getting bigger — but that’s a good thing
• World Spider Catalog
• Lost Rivets and Threads, and Ecosystems Pulled Apart
• Warming reverses top-down effects of predators on belowground ecosystem function in Arctic tundra
• Population differences in aggression are shaped by tropical cyclone-induced selection

Technology Won't Save Us From Climate Change

Salon - Keith A. Spencer

It's not hard to save the planet. But not if we insist on enriching entrepreneurs on the way

Climeworks C02 Capture Device (Climeworks)

Keith A. Spencer Keith A. Spencer is a senior editor for Salon. He manages Salon's science, tech, economy and health coverage. Keith is the author of "A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy".

If the Roman Republic understood the conditions that caused climate change, they could have easily put a stop to it. That’s because all you have to do to halt climate change is stop using fossil fuels and plant a huge number of trees. Together, these acts would reduce the surfeit of man-made carbon dioxide currently tainting the atmosphere and wreaking havoc on our planet.
That idea — that an ancient civilization with no electricity and no technological-industrial complex akin to Silicon Valley could solve climate change — might sound sacrosanct to the sophistic entrepreneurs and their journalistic lackeys who invest in these kinds of things. Indeed, for at least a decade, the media landscape has been littered with casuist puff-pieces with headlines like:

• “This Machine Just Started Sucking CO2 Out Of The Air To Save Us From Climate Change” (Fast Company, May 2017)
• “Start-Ups Hoping to Fight Climate Change Struggle as Other Tech Firms Cash In” (New York Times, May 2019)
• “Sucking carbon from air, Swiss firm wins new funds for climate fix” (Reuters, August 2018)
• “These companies are leading the fight against climate change” (CNN Business, October 2018)
• “Why and how business must tackle climate change now” (Forbes, October 2018)

The unsaid message behind these stories? Climate change is the kind of monetizable “problem” that business can “solve” — as if it were akin to smoothing over a supply chain hiccup or a PR crisis.
But it isn’t. Climate change is a political problem with a political solution. The Roman Republic had, at its peak, a well-organized, representative government capable of large-scale public works project, like the Roman aqueducts or the vast Roman road system that stretched across North Africa and southern Europe. If the political will existed among the citizenry, the republic could certainly organize itself to solve the climate crisis.
With a reorganization of society and industry, we could easily do as the Romans. Yet our civilization has been collectively hypnotized by the tech industry into believing that everything can be solved by more gadgetry and more money thrown at the tech sector.
Because of the entrancing nature of Silicon Valley’s gadgetmakers, we often can’t see this when it’s happening in front of us. But you need only look to other industries that Silicon Valley has “innovated” in to see the results.
Take Juicero, for instance: a $400 juicer that squeezes proprietary packets that could easily be wrung with one’s hand, and offer no marked improvement over the millennia-old citrus squeezer “technology.” What the now-defunct Juicero did do, however, was make its users dependent on its absurd and wasteful juice packet subscriptions. Google invested hundreds of millions in Juicero before it went bankrupt. “Innovation,” indeed.
Or you might consider another Silicon Valley "innovation" like social media, an elaborate digital social system whose primary function seems to be getting us hooked on using it. It has demonstrably made humans more narcissistic and less happy. Now, the social media companies are doing a collective hand-wringing to come up with strategies to undo the damage.
This is how Silicon Valley fixes things, or rather, pretends do: first, by inventing problems in the first place, then issuing their own "solve." It’s not a model I would apply to the thorny issue of the survival of all life on Earth.
But the more pressing concern here is that technology simply cannot solve the problems that it created. Never forget that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all global emissions; or that tech giants are some of the worst offenders when it comes to producing disposable goods or being complicit in an endless cycle of planned obsolescence.
Recently, the consumer-facing tech industry has transformed to a rentier model. In this model, you don’t necessarily ever own gadgets, software or media; you merely rent them from a corporation forever. Businesses prefer this model, as rather than buying something once, you pay to rent it forever — and that means far more money for them in the long run.
I have no doubt that if we let techno-capitalists tackle climate change, we will end up with a similar situation: world governments will contract out carbon capture to a group of tech behemoths whom we will pay forever to rent their equipment and keep things in a stable state. If they fix the problem and remove all the excess carbon from the atmosphere, their services will become useless — and their shareholders and investors certainly wouldn’t like that. Better to keep the problem intact as long as possible to wring dry the public sector for all eternity — ironically, fixing the problems that technology, largely, created. It's the perfect grift.
Unfortunately, Silicon Valley’s brand of magical thinking has so poisoned us that few are capable of seeing the notion of a technological fix for climate change as a farce. Capitalism treats the environment as an externality and insatiably creates waste and pollution. That’s a doctrine that is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.

Links

• Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find
• Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says
• The techno-thrill is gone
• Cutting-Edge CO2 Tracking Technology Could Boost Climate Liability Claims
• Using Technology To Fight Climate Change
• This Artificial "Leaf" Can Produce Fuels From Carbon Dioxide And Sunlight