The media coverage of global warming has become a roar that even climate change recalcitrants like the Prime Minister cannot ignore. Yet my experience with the Federal Government is such that I long ago lost faith in them. I previously thought that two people or organisations could look at the facts and come up with different conclusions and this explained the difference between their positions. Such differences in position would be honest and honourable.

Click this line to download the 2007 edition of the Cairns Green Directory (70 KB pdf).

The lack of alternative views on issues has always intrigued me. Does in mean that people are happy with the our current leaders and their policies? Does it mean there is such a dire lack of talent in the community that as a whole we lack the imagination and skill to take on the politicians? Or is the standard reason really the truth, that Australians are simply to apathetic to do anything. Finally, the academics are beginning to get a handle on this issue.

For people who need storm surge/tsunami surge mapping, the Google Earth mapping from a previous article has been coverted to PDF format. Click on this link to download the Cairns City storm surge mapping (0.4 MB). Please note that the mapping seems to be inaccurate in places and in our opinion some places which are shown to be safe from 2 m surges will go under much sooner than expected.

Yesterday, I received Cairn’s City Council’s ‘Report to the Community’ in which they tell us how great they were last year. Obviously the next election is getting close. One of the things that they are crowing about is how prepared they were when Cyclone Larry hit. If they are so good, why is it still so easy to spot unresolved issues?

Future of Cairns haspreviously raised doubtsabout the competence of authorities to deal with the impactof a major cyclone on Cairns.  It is always difficult to writeabout the capacity of authorities to respond to emergencies because theemergency response system is an amalgam of differentorganisations.  To my surprise, even those who are directly incharge vital parts of the system don’t fully understand allaspects of the system.

Please click this link to see the article.  Community Server can't render some articles correctly so they have to be stored as separate web pages.

The articles at Future of Cairns are generally written from personal first hand experience and knowledge of the local area. Last weeks article was about the future of farming in Australia. We raise issues that will arise beyond the immediate future as not talking about these issues is the surest way of making the unwanted future happen. There is a fine line between detecting and raising issues that Cairns and Australia must address and just being conduit of depressing messages - something which we seek to avoid.

It could be all over Rover said the Mayor. A multi-million dollar upgrade to the Cairns botanical gardens could go down the gurgler because of one rusty old oil tank. The melodramatic statement was on the front page of this week’s Cairns Sun. In the text of the article the usual problem solving mentality also makes another appearance – if we smashed everything ages ago we would not be having this problem now. If this multi-million dollar gardens project is really at risk is this because the laws in Queensland are stupid or because the council is stupid?