Following on from the “no snow by 2050” story earlier today, the ABC gleefully reports more doom and gloom on the state of the alpine catchments. Perhaps they thought nobody would check:
SIMON SANTOW (ABC World Today): Sixty per cent of the 235 catchments are rated poor to moderate – most are declining. (source)
Here’s the reality:
Catchment condition
If the ABC (and the report) were not desperate to paint an awful picture of a wasteland ravaged by man-made climate change (which they most certainly are), you could alternatively say that over 90% of the catchment areas were in either moderate or good condition. Well done.
But what’s more obvious are the trends in condition:
Catchment trends
There is no way that anyone could possibly say that “most are declining”. In fact, over 80% are “no change” or “improving”. ABC, please explain.
Source is here (9MB PDF).
Australian Climate Madness 
Hell….never let the truth get in the way of a good story!!
ABC: More spin than a category 5
The Australian Pravda, The Political arm of the ALP..
They’d sooner gargle battery acid than admit that things are okay.
The first part is shameless spin. The second part is just a blatant lie. This is what we pay them for?
Remember the CRU said in 2001 that “kids will never know what snow is” …. Then in 2010 the UK had blizzards so bad that Heathrow closed for 5 days due to being unprepared due to listening to the AGW madness. This year Heathrow spent $millions to be prepared. Guess they don’t believe AGW in private.
As mentioned by MarcH in the previous post, it would appear evaluations were based on opinions of individuals sitting in workshops and not based on any data or field work, which is evident by this statement from page 32 of the report, “The assessment was based on judgments from individuals and not by quantitative data and systematic survey and this was an important limitation. In addition, no field survey or ground truthing was completed.
Further, the methods used to evaluate the condition of the catchments in the report were sub-standard and not based on usual scientific methods but economic, simplistic and generalised methods, as indicated by this statement, “The method was simple, cost-effective and was focused on major issues,” from page 33 of the report.
As a major strategy for the environmental protection of the Australian Alps catchments, this plan is rather useless. It is not based on any data but rather opinions of people who sat in offices because it was too expensive to do any field work.
what’s with the full dams then
What’s more … when you look at both diagrams together you discover that 50% of those areas designated as ‘poor’ on figure 3.3 are then shown as ‘improving’ in figure 3.4, so the problem is far less than stated by the ABC.
I look forward to Media Watch giving this a comprehensive airing. Then I’ll flap my arms and fly to the moon.
Where are Melbourne’s catchments on these maps? I am just looking at the report in today’s Herald Sun which tells me that they are at 62.9% capacity and there has been a rise of 1299 megalitres since yesterday. Most of the 10 reservoirs serving Melbourne are now almost full, whilst Maroondah and O’Shannassy are flooded and releasing water over the spillways.
Our rainfall to date for 2011 has been 606.6 mm whereas it was only 454.2 mm over the same period in 2010.
These figures are published daily and it is inconceivable that the ABC is completely unable to look at them.
The fools really do not expect us to check, after all we are all stupid aren’t we?
Another of these pre-programmed robots stated a day or two ago on Andrew Bolt’s blog that Perth’s reservoirs were catastrophic with only some 37%. I checked and the figures quoted were about right. However this clone didn’t think anyone would look further. I did and discovered that Perth’s water supply is mainly from an underground reserve which is some 150 cubic kilometres and it has been there for 40,000 years. Only 27% of Perth’s supply comes from the reservoirs and at least 40% is pumped into the mains from the underground reserves.
Any new government must put the ABC under intense examination and get rid of everyone who has been falsifying information.
No… the ABC is biased? Who would’ve thought?
More of what we expect from our ABC…