Two sides to lake tale
TORONTO residents were cautiously relieved when Lake Macquarie City Council rescinded the resolution in 2019 to proceed with a speculative, high-rise foreshore development. A vigorous campaign by the community to retain the Bath Street site for public parkland seemed to have been successful.
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However, as noted by your correspondent Robert Ireland ("Toronto still waiting", Lakes Mail, February 13) the council, disappointingly, has not engaged further with the Toronto community. Many residents will now find it particularly galling to learn that council has voted to spend close to $1 million to purchase a waterfront house in Swansea "to facilitate the extension of Swansea town park".
The western side of Lake Macquarie is being treated very differently to the eastern side. One only has to drive, cycle or walk from Speers Point through Warners Bay to Eleebana to compare the lakeside facilities those suburbs enjoy to the lack of such in Toronto.
As 2020 begins, this community will keep reminding council that they are elected to listen to, communicate with, and serve their total local government area.
- Kate Elderton, Toronto
Warming irrationality
THE climate policy question is not whether we face significant warming, which we do every year. Nor is it whether the climate changes, which no-one has ever denied.
The question is whether a minor fraction of the tiny man-made fraction of total atmospheric CO2 will cause a greenhouse effect forcing catastrophic global warming which will make the planet uninhabitable soon, and which policy can selflessly remedy at a worthwhile cost in our enforced sacrifices. Warmists always conveniently leave out the last bit.
Merely showing warming does not prove that it's caused by man. Proving extra CO2 is logically not good enough; there needs to be a causal connection to catastrophic global warming. And we need actual logical proof by reference to real climate, not fake climates in computer models.
It is ironical that, while your correspondent Mr Boyd ("Heroes not hypocrites", Lakes Mail, February 6) appeals fallaciously to the absent authority of the International Panel on Climate Change, its chief has publicly admitted that global warming is a religion.
Governments have wasted $30 billion producing politicised, openly biased, fundamentally illogical alarmism, in the service of huge corporate and governmental vested interests. This is what the warmists and media are calling "science".
The problem is precisely that they have no way to rationally justify any climate policy by reference back to reality, nor their own premises, using any method of reason.
Obviously if you disregard human values, and logic, you will end up with the kind of belief system that the global warming religion now has.
- Justin Jefferson, Toronto
No coal? No worries
ON January 31, severe storms tore down one of the nation's biggest transmission lines, isolating South Australia.
Their considerable investment in solar, wind and batteries allowed the state to avoid any loss of power and, since then, SA has continued to operate in isolation from the national grid using a combination of gas and renewables, with renewables providing on average over 50 per cent of their demand, and reaching 75 per cent, on occasions. Impressive as the demand includes the massive Portland smelter which was on the SA side of the failure.
No coal, no issues that could not be managed, and SA's normally higher power prices have been lower over this period than those of coal-dominated NSW. The SA Liberal government is aiming for 100 per cent renewable power but this shows what is already possible when you have no coal.
- Richard Mallaby, Wangi Wangi
