The Bullroarer - Thursday 5th February 2009

Stuff.co.nz - AA calls for fuel price reduction

A spike in petrol prices by the major fuel companies on Tuesday should be reversed following positive developments overnight, the Automobile Association (AA) says.

SMH - Scorchers 'may be due to climate change'

Protracted warm, dry weather in NSW has prompted speculation among meteorologists that climate change could be to blame.

After a week of temperatures in the high-20s to mid-30s, Sydney is set to fry under scorching 40-plus temperatures at the weekend, with extreme fire danger in the city's west.

National Business Review NZ - Labour critical of climate change policy

The trade minister would have had a hard time negotiating on his recent overseas missions because of the Government's "backward steps on climate change", Labour trade spokeswoman Maryan Street said.

Last month, Tim Groser attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland before travelling to Germany and Belgium to meet with European Union officials.

Canberra Times - Australian city planning hurtles towards crossroads

Australia's cities are rightly regarded as some of the finest urban environments in the world but they, too, are in trouble.

The Sydney city region is typical. Its traffic levels are among the highest in the world, its air pollution routinely breaches World Health Organisation standards, and its planning and metropolitan governance are not fit for the purpose. Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne have fuelled traffic growth with an excess of highly expensive new highways and a failure to recognise global trends in so-called demand management.

London has its congestion charge, Toronto will not build new roads and many other cities are heavily into high-quality public transport, walking and cycling strategies. Australia is being left behind.

ABC - Climate scientists look to Indian Ocean for reasons behind drought

TONY EASTLEY: Australia's south-east is still in the grip of drought but scientists believe they might have a better idea of what's causing the big dry. In recent years, the so-called El Nino effect has figured in the thinking based on rises and falls in sea temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

But new research suggests it might actually be the waters on the other side of Australia that are to blame.

The Australian - Bellwether's warning bodes ill for exports

BHP Billiton's powerful interim will be remembered as the last luminous cash-flow supernova of a boom that was supposed to be a secular shift and turned out to be as violently cyclical as ever.

Reuters - Drought in Australia food bowl continues

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Drought in Australia's main food growing region of the Murray-Darling river system continues, with water stores near record lows despite recent rains, the head of the government's oversight body for the system said on Wednesday.

The long-running drought has hit irrigated crops such as rice, grapes and horticulture hardest, but has had less impact on wheat with good falls of rainfall in grain-growing areas to the north of the Murray-Darling River basin.

Stuff.co.nz - Race to the Sky Tower

A ninety minute commute up the southern motorway in morning peak hour traffic averaging a speed of just 23 kilometres an hour was the experience of a volunteer in a BusinessDay's exercise to test the cost of congestion on Aucklanders.

We assembled a team of six who each set off in various modes of transport from the North, South, West and Auckland Airport into central Auckland to test the effects of congestion in Auckland now the first school term has started.

National Business Review NZ - Don Brash: NZ economy faces ‘perfect storm’

Saying that it was fashionable to blame free and unregulated financial markets Dr Brash countered that none of the countries in trouble even have free and unregulated financial markets.

He says instead, that to the extent regulation created a perception that rules were being followed and boxes ticked so the banks must be safe - regulation may have actually contributed to the financial crisis.

And in some respects New Zealand is better placed than other countries to weather the crisis, says Dr Brash.

This is because New Zealand’s unemployment was lower than any other developed country when the downturn began, government debt relative to the economy was amongst the lowest in the world, we have a much more robust banking sector than the US or Europe, and there was plenty of room to ease monetary conditions with lower interest and exchange rates.

The Daily Telegraph - A $4 million garage sale as transport fleet sold off

THE cash-strapped State Government is flogging its ageing transport fleet in a desperate bid to fund an anticipated Budget deficit of $2 billion.

More than $4 million worth of buses, JetCats and even RailCorp railway sleepers are up for grabs.

Sydney Ferries said yesterday it had two offers for its JetCat fleet sitting idle in Mort Bay, near Balmain. The three JetCats, which served the Manly-Circular Quay route, were dumped by the Government on December 31, with private operator Bass and Flinders now running the service.

The Australian - Indians need our uranium: Flannery

SCIENTIST Tim Flannery has accused Australia of taking an immoral position by exporting polluting coal to India but refusing to sell it uranium to help it establish a cleaner power-generation industry.

On a tour of India promoting renewable energy alternatives to business leaders and government, the author of The Weathermakers said India's plan to build a new generation of coal-fired power stations in the next five years would be a catastrophe for the country because it would lessen its energy security.

"They're backing themselves into a situation where they will have a lot of what is now cheap energy but which will inevitably become more expensive because there will be a cost on carbon," Dr Flannery told The Australian in New Delhi.

"These plants have a 50-year lifespan and no one can imagine that in 2040 we won't be paying an impost on carbon pollution," he said. "But there seems to be very little awareness of that in government."

We must remember the rule that heat and droughts and floods are caused by global warming, but any unusually cold winters in other places are just random processes. Certainly the precautionary principle plus surface ocean acidification are enough reasons to stop digging up coal. Basing all argument on specific imagined effects makes it impossible to get the sort of global consensus you need, since obviously there are winners as well as losers, at least at the level of decadal variation.

Go Tim Flannery!

P.S. It should not be necessary to say this but just in case: The surface ocean has negative acid level [is basic] and no one is suggesting that acidification means getting all the way to positive levels.

The ocean doesn't have to be below pH7 to dissolve most corals and ocean floor carbonates, its getting very close to doing this now due to CO2 converting most of the carbonate ion( to bicarbonate). Ironically, dissolving corals( and other CaCO3) will help to remove CO2 from atmosphere. If all of the CaCO3 was dissolved and carbonate ion removed sea water could become slightly acidic.

Well, they can blame AGCC for the heatwave, but they'll never prove it. It's a random event, just like North Queensland being underwater right now. AGCC theory predicts that we'll have more heatwaves like this one in the future, but trying to pin AGCC onto any given weather event is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

Climate scientists look to Indian Ocean for reasons behind drought

Makes sense. Our weather comes largely from the West, so water evaporated off the Indian Ocean falls Eastward.

Drought in Australia food bowl continues

Waouldn't it be great if we had a Government who could implement a, say, 'nation-building' infrastructure project, that would take water from flooded North Queensland and deposit it in the upper reaches of the murray-Darling? Power the pumps with Solar Thermal.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Government who could implement a, say, 'nation-building' infrastructure project, that would take water from flooded North Queensland and deposit it in the upper reaches of the murray-Darling? Power the pumps with Solar Thermal.

The possibility of shipping excess water from Qld was seriously considered. The amount of power required to pump water that far was greater than the amount of power required to recycle or desalinate the same quantity of water, so this option was never pursued.