Doubt over findings of imminent doom
I REFER to Tony Fontes local dive boat operator and Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) Reef Campaigners letter 15/9, 10 brownie points for holding the cult line.
I can’t let that rhetoric rhubarb you are asserting in your letter go by without a big question being asked.
What happened to yesterday’s world being in peril because there was a hole in the ozone layer, the ice was melting and the world would end from the heat that would penetrate the hole in the ozone layer. The call for the gas in fridges, air conditioners spray cans and cars had to be eliminated, so here we go again.
Now coal-fired power stations are the death of our planet and particularly our Great Barrier Reef – the science says so.
One has to ask how these scientists survive and make a living.
To get funding they need the fear factor.
The science can only survive by grants paid for by the hard working taxpayer of Australia and other countries.
So create a crisis so science will receive grants to predict new perils and save the world, it serves the scientist’s purpose to prolong the crisis and keep the money flowing to the universities and academics and condemn anyone who dares to question the science and potentially cut off the cash flow.
The letter states that the reef will be destroyed by a coal fired power station as it spews its vile toxic coal emissions whilst producing tainted contaminated electricity.
You can’t be serious – one power station can destroy the reef?
We had better buy some more solar panels and wind turbines from China as they are good world citizens and are heading to be carbon neutral, 10 to 20 years after Australia, while still building hundreds of new coal fired power stations. There seems to be something drastically wrong with this science.
Oh by the way Greenpeace is spending millions to advertise for funding and are now calling it a climate crisis; is it a funding crisis or a world crisis?
SANDRA CHESNEY,
Jensen.
TOWN FACES FLOOD CRISIS
I AM not an alarmist and I am not crying wolf.
I just want to point out that there is a risk of an unprecedented disastrous flooding of Home Hill and the surrounding farming areas when a large Burdekin River flood (such as that in 1917, 1958, 1974 and 1991) will occur again.
The difference between those floods and the next one is that the riverbed downstream of the Inkerman Bridge has risen since the Burdekin Falls Dam was built.
The dam has reduced the river’s sand carrying capacity. Hydrodynamic modelling suggests that, from backwater effects, this raises the flood levels by 1 to 1.5m over the historical levels. This may be disastrous in a future large flood.
This is because there are several large erosion scars coming to within a few metres from the top of the natural levees on the south bank of the river in the sugar cane district, as is revealed by aerial photographs last Friday by drone pilots Chris Hopper and Ingrid Naschwitz.
I suspect that a large flood, with its peak water level now raised by an extra 1 to 1.5m, may cut through an erosion scar and develop a new river channel to the sea.
This is because the land slopes downward from the top of the levee and the new channel would be shorter and thus have a steeper slope than the existing river channel that is now choking by a sand build-up. The natural excavation of this new river channel through farmland around Home Hill will be facilitated by air bubbling up from the old river sand at depth in this area when the land is wetted.
This liquefies the top soil and makes it readily erodible.
Remediation measures are urgently needed.
PROFESSOR ERIC WOLANSKI, Townsville.
FRENCH FORGET HISTORY
I REFER to Ando’s article “Talk Of The North” (TB 25/9).
So, the French are sore at us for not buying those submarines off them as previously agreed.
They won’t even talk to our prime minister by phone. How rude. Sorry folks, no more frog legs for supper. All is forgotten what our wonderful young Aussie boys (all volunteers) did for France at Amiens in World War I.
They died fighting to keep the Germans out of their beloved country, and won.
Maybe the French should read a little more about their own history.