The Reef is fine, the Forests are overgrown, and the River will keep flowing. Science, though is a disaster. What can we do?
Help figure out how to get science working again for the people and the environment, instead of the crisis industry and bureaucrats.
Join us at the AEF Webinar | Tuesday Nov 24, 2020 | 07:30 PM East Coast DST time
Peter Ridd, Jo Nova, Alan Moran.
Science has been turned in to a fundraising activity rather than a quest for the truth. Instead of helping the Reef, the Forests and the River, scientists use them as perpetual cash cows. They don’t have incentives to solve problems, only to highlight them. No one is paid to find that Nature is doing OK or that Solar cycles drive the climate. So billions of dollars may be thrown away on fashionable but irrelevant quests — money which could be put to much better use.
We’ll discuss how Australia’s three big environmental issues are stuck in scientific ruts and discuss what can be done to get science back on track. Would some kind of official watchdog help, or will any formal unit be captured by the some process that strangled peer review and scientific associations? Can incentives be changed to align scientists with a quest for truth and better predictions?
Peter Ridd will talk about the spectacular health and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s one of the most pristine ecosystems on earth yet scientists have persuaded everyone that climate change and pollution from farms has almost killed it. Corals appear to be growing faster than they were one hundred years ago. Bleaching has always happened, and corals always grow back.
Jo Nova will explain how our pyroclastic wildfires are made worse by Green land management practices, and these preventable disasters are then used as fearful marketing ploy to promote carbon reduction. The Black Summer Fires have almost nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with megatons of fuel left untended and droughts which have always come and gone.
It took a half century to turn Australia’s largest river system from an arid zone to one that makes 40% of Australia’s entire farm output. About one third to half of all the water was going into irrigation, but as the inevitable cycle of droughts returned, people panicked about salinity and wildlife and worried about the health of the Fake Lake that had sprung up at the end of the Murray River. So the Government spent nearly $7 billion dollars to buy back a quarter of the irrigators water.
Australian Environment Foundation
Tuesday Nov 24, 2020 07:30 PM East Coast DST time