Moving water at Sydney Uni

It is about time that I post something again, so here is an interesting conundrum that I found in “Ground Cover” the GRDC publication. There are two articles right below each other. The first one is the article outlining the climate variability salinity link postulated by Prof. Ian Acworth that I have discussed before. Just below this article is an article that has the title “runoff plays a major role in salinity”. Looks like an interesting conundrum to me!

This past Friday and Saturday, I was on a fieldtrip with some of the 2nd year students. This year I had managed to organise a trip to visit Tarwyn Park in the upper Hunter valley, the property which is now relatively well known in Australia through the work by Peter Andrews. I had read Peter's book and I was interested to see the place for myself, and my students were enthusiastic when I suggested this. So last Friday was the big day as we arrived around 2 pm.

The ETS was defeated in the Senate. Australian politicians aren’t even able to take a modest step towards a lower carbon economy. Maybe it is no surprise if people like Senator Fielding get elected to parliament. We are a long way behind the rest of the world people, we better get used to being regarded as the backwater, the slow ones, the ignorant bunch.

Where is all the excitement in research? Where will the major questions about the human future be solved? You guessed it: In Agriculture!

Agriculture is often seen as the backwater, a dull topic with little excitement. Faculties of Agriculture are almost non-existent in Australia and those that still exist have difficulty attracting new students. This is very surprising and, as Paul Myers eloquently argued, to the detriment of us all.

There were two interesting articles in last Thursday’s newspaper related to water. The first talked about how probably most of the federal government’s buybacks of water would occur in NSW and that this would strongly affect the rural economy. I have talked about this earlier and given that the article mainly presents the irrigation corporations view, I will not comment on this further. However it does strengthen the point that buybacks of water need to be combined with rural socio-economic reform.

The other article discusses the findings in a report from the group at UNSW working with Professor Richard Kingsford. I would like to use this report to talk about science. I don’t think the report is a bad report or is not good science, but it allows me to discuss some broader issues related to the way we do science.

Hal Geering, retired lecturer in our Faculty passed me a copy of the Murray Darling basin Forum on the ABC Science Show on 27 December. I had missed that, but found it interesting reading. In particular a few comments made by Dr. John Williams during the forum. I quote: “I think we need to be careful that we don’t play around with the symptoms and not deal with the cause” (responding to some of Dr. Rob Fitzpatrick’s plans with Acid Sulfate Soils). And “we’ve got to recognise that we’ve got a highly managed system now”. Later: “it’s you and I who are taking the water out of the river because you’ve probably got a cotton singlet on, as I have [..] So it’s us taking the water out not the farmer”. Even later, responding on a question from the audience: “There’s a terrific amount of science sitting on shelves”.

I think I would like to comment on all these little gems and in addition make a link to some of the issues raised by my colleague Michael Harris in his blog (see the blogrol as well)