top soil question

Has anyone else in the valley noticed how quickly the topsoil dries out. Since the good rain we have had I decided to plant some trees. I had some seeds that I'd potted up and they were growing strong, so it was time for them to go out into the big world. The hole were dug, fertiliser was ready so in they went.

I noticed when I was digging the holes that the first 50 to 70mm was dry. Under that the soil was moist, and the clay layer was wet. I thought that all the extra water that these trees would need was a good wetting-in on planting.

It was surprising that on inspection two days later the trees were showing all the symptoms of lack of water.

The topsoil was bone dry and the more disturbed the soil the deeper the dryness. Where I had dug the holes for the trees the dryness extended a good 100mm or more.

This has led me to thinking about what would cause this problem. Since most of the trees were well mulched when they were planted, direct sunlight should not have caused the drying soil.

We have not had extremely hot weather so that could not be the cause either.

This made me think about the drought we have just had. Could it be that over the combined dry years the humus in the soil has depleted to such an extent that it leaves the surface topsoil vulnerable to drying?

This is my current theory, but I am open to other suggestions.

If you have noticed the same thing in your garden in the Clarence Valley I would be very interested to hear of your experiences and what you think may be causing this. Or is it just my imagination?

Lost in translation or simply weird science? Japan's whale research

News.com.au carried this report on Japan's whale research yesterday .

 

"AN official scientific review of Japan's bizarre experiments with test-tube minke babies and attempts at cross-breeding cows with whales has exploded the claim whale slaughter is "research".

Scientists have analysed the 43 research papers produced by Japan after 18 years of killing whales and concluded they are useless, strange and esoteric."

 

While in 2005 the Cetacean Society International had this to say about Japan's low priority lethal research.

 

"What do non-Japanese scientists say about JARPA II? Dr. Phil Clapham, director of large whale research at the U.S. National Marine Mammal Lab in Seattle, Washington says: "Japan's scientific whaling program has been widely criticized as a cover for a growing commercial hunt." "The quality of the scientific research is extremely poor, providing almost no information of value for the management of whale populations despite 16 years of operation and thousands of whales killed. Japan's research exists for one purpose only: to `prove' - no matter what the data actually say - that whales eat too much fish and are thus in competition with Japanese fisheries. This isn't the case, and is not even relevant in the Antarctic, where whales eat krill."

 

Last year Science Direct carried this abstract concerning Japan's whaling policy.

 

"Morishita's "multiple analysis" of the whaling issue [Morishita J. Multiple analysis of the whaling issue: Understanding the dispute by a matrix. Marine Policy 2006;30:802–8] is essentially a restatement of the Government of Japan's whaling policy, which confuses the issue through selective use of data, unsubstantiated facts, and the vilification of opposing perspectives. Here, we deconstruct the major problems with Morishita's article and provide an alternative view of the whaling dispute. For many people in this debate, the issue is not that some whales are not abundant, but that the whaling industry cannot be trusted to regulate itself or to honestly assess the status of potentially exploitable populations. This suspicion has its origin in Japan's poor use of science, its often implausible stock assessments, its insistence that culling is an appropriate way to manage marine mammal populations, and its relatively recent falsification of whaling and fisheries catch data combined with a refusal to accept true transparency in catch and market monitoring. Japanese policy on whaling cannot be viewed in isolation, but is part of a larger framework involving a perceived right to secure unlimited access to global marine resources. Whaling is inextricably tied to the international fisheries agreements on which Japan is strongly dependent; thus, concessions made at the IWC would have potentially serious ramifications in other fora."

 

It appears that Japan will have difficulty in sustaining the fiction that its Antarctic whale hunt is 'science'.

Its official credibility may now hinge on how many nation members at this weekend's International Whaling Commission talks it can induce to overlook the flaws in its argument for lethal research.

The Solomon Islands has declined to attend the meeting this year.

"Usually Japan pays for our attendance," Prime Minister Derek Sikua said. But he said the Solomons had declined to attend a special closed meeting on the future of the IWC that wound up in London last night.

"This time we have refused their assistance, so we haven't gone because we can't afford it," Mr Sikua said. He was unable to say how much the support of the Solomons had cost the Japanese in previous years."

 

While not condoning the protest methods of the Sea Shepherd organisation, it is more than passing strange to see Japan's so-called annual scientific expedition defend itself with flash grenades.

 

Here's how the US media reported the incident.

 

"TOKYO -- The Japanese coast guard says the crew of a whale-processing ship clashed with anti-whaling activists from the Friday Harbor (Washington) based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

It happened in the Antarctic Ocean, 1,800 miles south-southwest of Melbourne.

The captain of the anti-while ship, Paul Watson, says he was shot, but saved by a Kevlar vest.

Japan denies a shot was fired. The coast guard says the crew of the whaling ship, Nisshin Maru, threw stun grenades after the activists threw rotten butter, bottles and bags of white powder at the processing ship.

Watson says they were throwing stink bombs."

Crikey on John Winston Howard in Washington 2008

Crikey on Friday 7 March 2008.

Bernard Keane looks at John Howard.

"Having been abandoned by the Australian electorate, his own constituents and, finally, by his own party, John Howard has had to retreat to the United States to find a sanctuary from where he can defend his record.---
Defeat doesn't appear to have agreed with Howard. Perhaps, deep in the bowels of Parliament House, there's a Dorian Gray-style portrait of him. Now that the spell has been broken, the picture has reverted to the Howard with hair, black-rimmed specs and bad teeth, and the man himself has started decaying before our very eyes. There's something pathetic about his preaching to his last remaining mates. It must infuriate him that Australia has so quickly moved on from him, and taken most of his former colleagues with it, leaving him to look like a relic from another age. But as Paul Keating would tell him, there's nothing so ex as an ex-Prime Minister."

A short list of pollies who should've been drowned at birth

A short list of pollies who should've been drowned at birth and some reasons why

 

Brendan Nelson - for that mean spirited attempt at an apology to the Stolen Generations, condoning MPs retiring just because they don't like being on the Opposition benches, and for being generally useless.

 

Peter Costello - for taking his portmanteau of grimaces with him when he went to the backbench and for obviously deciding that the work of parliament is now beneath him. 

 

Tony Abbott - for still defending the indefensible policies of John Howard, having the hide to describe NT Intervention law as having 'purity', and for continuing to inflict those d*amn ears on us all.

 

Alexander Downer - for thinking the Australian electorate now owes him a work-free living until he decides when to take early retirement.

 

Wilson 'Iron Bar' Tuckey - for revelling in both his nickname and his barely concealed racism, as well as thinking that a paid engagement on the Love Boat was a proper use of an MP's time.

 

Joe Hockey - for constantly nitpicking and blustering during Question Time and for repeatedly misquoting Part 3 Section 39 of the Australian Constitution.

 

Luke Hartsuyker - for embarrassing his electorate with his baa-baa mentality on that Friday House of Reps sitting day.

 

Warren Truss - for failing to take firm control of the Nationals and allowing its MPs to walk all over him.

 

Mark Vaile - for acting as a paid lobbyist in the Middle East and for not remembering that this was where he only escaped the Oil-for-Food scandal by the skin of his teeth.

 

Julie Bishop - for giving what must be the silliest hairsplitting reasons why the Coalition should not support the abolition of WorkChoices and then recanting same. 

 

Malcolm Turnbull - for constantly trailing his prospective leadership cape in front of the media when he knows it is still possible that the unresolved HIH matter may make him an embarrassment to the Liberal Party.

 

Peter McGuaran - for cynically changing parties and then standing for re-election with his fingers crossed behind his back.

 

Christopher Pyne - for continuing to inflict pyneonline.com.au on us all and for defending Costello, Downer etc.

When the wind rips the roof off my house and the sea drowns my front yard....

It seems that every time I look around some self-proclaimed Expert On Everything decides to deny global warming.

 

Tim Blair was at it again at the end of February. As was Andrew Bolt.

Andrew really gave it his all , including a link to Watts up with that? showing graphs (which perversely appear to disprove his case).

As usual Tim and Andrew have not allowed facts to get in the way of a sensationalised blog, showing a propensity to confuse relatively short-term observable weather patterns with real evidence against global warming.

 

NASA, taking a more balanced view of the methodology, reveals that when limiting temperature comparisons to a single month across a few years or to a particular location there will inevitably be a wide variation.

 

There is no getting away from the fact that all the graphs used in the Blair-Bolt denialist argument show a warming trend over the last 100 years, as evidenced by the following anomalous temperature graph. 

 

Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change

 

Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present. The dotted black line is the annual mean and the solid red line is the five-year mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates. [This is an update of Fig. 1A in Hansen, et al. (2006)]

Figure available as large GIF, PDF, or Postscript. Also available are tabular data.

(Last modified: 2008-01-11)

 

So Tim and Andrew - put a sock in it or I will be knocking on your doors when increasingly severe storms, flooding and saltwater inundation make it imperative that I have help in stacking sandbags around my house.

Is Foxtel playing dirty with McCain presidential campaign?

This little snippet from Chilling Effects makes for interesting reading.

"Associated Press, October 26, 2007
Abstract: The Associated Press reports that presidential candidate John McCain has rejected Fox's call to "cease and desist" from using Fox debate footage in a campaign ad.
Fox is apparently claiming infringement by the use of 18 seconds from a 90 minute debate, in which Sen. McCain is the speaker. Political argument, even in the heated sound-bite form of campaign ads, is at the core of First-Amendment protected speech. This kind of commentary use, of newsworthy material available only from Fox, suggests that not only McCain, but the general public should have greater access to debate footage."

The fight received wide media coverage at the time, but does not appear to have been completely resolved as just last month Fox "We Report You Decide'" News was labelling the Republican McCain as a 'Democrat' in its news footage, and early this month McCain was only rating as a main news maker in about 18% of campaign stories across the media generally.

All of which leads me to wonder exactly who Rupert Murdoch will finally come close to endorsing as the next US President, because supporters of almost every presidential hopeful who started out in the primaries race have accused Fox and Murdoch of bias.

Political malcontent Luke Hartsuyker MP gets his long weekend back

The Rudd Government announced yesterday that it was abandoning its newly scheduled Friday sittings of the House of Reps, pointing to the Coalition's disruptive behaviour which twice suspended the House on the only Friday it sat so far this year.

 

I'm quite sure that Nationals Member for Cowper, Luke Hartsuyker thought he was being rather smart as he followed the Coalition mob, defied the Deputy-Speaker and forced that final suspension.

 

What he was of course was very transparent. Aside from an obvious chance to grab a national headline, Canberra gossip has it that our Luke was really showing just how miffed he was at the thought of losing his chance to return home early each week for the traditional pollies' long weekend.

 

Now he and his friends have had their way (or their bluff called), I expect that this wilful pollie will turn up in the local media hypocritically bewailing the loss of a sitting day.

Don't bother to keep clacking your clogs on the issue, Luke mate - few will believe you.

I certainly don't and neither it seems does the ABC's Virginia Trioli.