by P. Homewood, Feb 18, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Britain’s colonisation of Australia in the late 18th century is partly to blame for the nation’s recent ravaging by bushfires, a new study claims.
Before British ships carrying convicted criminals landed in New South Wales in January 1788, aboriginal people tended the landscape and were in charge of bushfire prevention.
But after the penal colony was established, and indigenous people were forced off their land and away from territories they had tended for centuries, the settlers took a new approach.
Suppression is now the primary focus. Instead of proactively and gradually reducing the risk of fire, authorities try to extinguish a fire as soon as possible after ignition.
Researchers from around the world, including Australia, have published a paper saying this change in tack has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago.
“Indigenous people managed Australia’s flammable vegetation with “cultural burning” practices,” the study authors write in an article for The Conversation.
“These involved frequent, low-intensity fires which led to a fine-grained vegetation mosaic comprising grassy areas and scattered trees.
“Landscapes managed in this way were less prone to destructive fires. But under colonial rule, Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their lands and often prevented from carrying out many important practices.”
The change in wildfire prevention due to colonisation has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago
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by P. Gosselin, Feb 18, 2022 in NoTrickZone
In 2007, in the wake of the 4th IPCC report and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Germany’s most widely circulated daily, Bild, reported:
There are only 13 years left to save our earth! Can the climate catastrophe still be prevented? There is only little time left to save our planet!” According to the World Climate Report, mankind has at most until 2020 to prevent the worst by introducing efficient technologies.
As reported by the Financial Times Deutschland, UN climate researchers predict: “If greenhouse gas emissions do not decrease substantially by 2020, global warming will set in motion irreversible processes such as the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and the acidification of the oceans.”
See original article (in German) here at Bild.
Since then, the horror scenarios obviously have not come to pass. Moreover, instead of greenhouse gases “substantially decreasing” globally, they’ve actually increased substantially.
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by Washington Are Beacon Staff, Feb 17, 2022 in The WashigntonFreeBeacon
For over a decade, scientists have warned that the acidification of ocean water could decimate fish populations. Acidification changed fish behavior, several studies found, making them less likely to evade predators.
As carbon emissions pushed pH levels higher and higher, climate advocates sounded an apocalyptic tone. Fewer fish would mean fewer fisheries, which would imperil the livelihoods of millions of fishermen across the globe. It could also mean fewer medicines, many of which are derived from marine life.
According to a new paper in a top-ranked biology journal, these concerns are vastly overblown.
The paper, published in PLOS Biology on Feb. 3, reviewed 91 studies of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior. It found that better-quality studies tended to find smaller effects on fish behavior—and that the studies with the most dramatic results tended to have low sample size, making them less statistically reliable.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
