Letter of the Week
Have strong opinions, write in an engaging way? You could win our Letter of the Week, and with it a book from our friends and sponsors, the publishers HarperCollins. This month’s book prize is The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley. In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather to celebrate New Year’s Eve. One of them is killed. Not an accident – a murder among friends.
PLANS to offer a ferry service actually come to fruition today and one would hope that this flags many more such projects.
Just think of all the reasons traffic chaos occurs on our roads and compare a water service where smooth uninterrupted transport is the name of the game.
The Gold Coast is the sixthlargest city in Australia and is still to benefit from the hundreds of kilometres of navigable waterways that traverse its suburbs.
It’s overdue that the Smart State showed such enterprise.
KEN JOHNSTON, ROCHEDALE SOUTH
THE installation of those lights, so their message is unable to be read from the highway, is akin to printing the Bulletin upside down.
Who was responsible?
TERRY STEPHENSON, ASHMORE
OH dear, where to begin with Bill Turner’s letter (GCB 1/02).
Firstly he quotes Ian Plimer. Dr Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, previously a professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, hardly someone you would call on for expert advice on climate.
When world climate change bodies say 97% of scientists agree that this is happening, it is not based on one single survey sent out to “10,257 people”, as Bill states.
In these years: 2014, 2 x 2013,
2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2004 and back as far as 1996, surveys were sent to scientists (not mining geologists) who had published papers within the climate field.
A 2016 paper (which was coauthored by Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, et al) summarised all the results from these surveys and concluded that “the finding of 97% consensus that humans are causing recent global warming’ is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies. Please, to the sceptics out there, go to your Saltbush Club meetings and discuss reality instead of throwing up misinformation and cherry-picking data.
JIM TAYLOR, MUDGEERABA
AS a professional scientist of some 60 years standing, I feel obliged to reply to the letter by Jim Taylor (GCB 31/01/19).
We scientists are a generally reserved lot and have tolerated ignorance on climate change for far too long, regrettably at great expense to the nation.
I would suggest that Jim Taylor get on the net where he will find thousands of scientific papers which show climate change is caused by the glacial cycle, which results from cyclic orbital variations of the Earth around the Sun. He could start with Colhoun, E. (1975): A Quaternary Climatic Curve For Tasmania – Australian Conference on Climate and Climate Change.
These are indisputable scientific facts as distinct from the “Alternative Facts” being pushed by the self-interested carpetbaggers from the academic community, to whom Jim Taylor refers.
There is absolutely no scientific proof that humans’ carbon dioxide emissions have any influence on these events. In fact the available evidence is quite to the contrary.
CHRIS BROWNE, ROBINA
SO, David Hall at Coombabah thinks PM Morrison will not make a scratch in history books (GCB 29/1/2019)
Better that than to be known as Bill the Wrecker, which is what Shorten is aspiring to.
His union/Labor mates have done just that to Australia, the car industry is just one example.
Now Shorten will destroy the coal industry, the source of billions of dollars of revenue to Australia.
He has already said he will wreck the income of thousands of Australians, like myself, who have saved and invested in income producing shares, only to see him deny us the benefits of franking credits.
Next, to pay for his grandiose costly schemes he will need to raise taxes to the detriment of all Australians, in particular the elderly.
He is well on the way to making Australia a socialist/communist country. Australians be very warty of voting Labor at any election.
KEV CROMPTON, TWEED HEADS SOUTH