Jo Chandler: “Feeling the Heat”, is the book doomed to the bargain bin before it is even published??

Hands up those who remember that Jo Chandler  was writing a  biography of Victoria’s former police commissioner Christine Nixon? Because as far as I can tell that book has  been published and  despite a lot of pre-publicity stuff having been pumped into it, now the book is doomed to obscurity, just like its subject, it has quietly sunk with that woman’s reputation after her disastrous failure to give effective leadership during the Bushfire crisis of two years ago. Heck the fact that Nixon  was chatting with her biographer rather than doing  her duty can’t be helping sales either.  Talk about the watcher’s watching influencing  the outcome in an unpredictable manner! Anyway what does a journalist/author  do when her first go at writing a book ends up being, well a bit of a non-starter? Well she tries another subject that she hopes will be topical enough to make herself a quid or two. Thus it seems to be with Chandler’s upcoming tome about climate change. Well in today’s Age we are treated to an extract of said book and reading it does not inspire confidence that it is going to be worth paying your hard earned dosh for what looks likely to be a whole series of emotional arguments and exercises in misanthropy.

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Warming is conjuring some formidable new obstacles to survival. For the early decades of their life, the turtles are pelagic fossickers, working the sea surface, so as with so many species of seabirds there are questions about what changing water temperatures might mean for them. Shifts in circulation and oceanographic behaviour might also influence them, especially hatchling distribution. On land, more frequent and stronger cyclones and rising sea levels would damage and erode rookery sites, although against these odds the patient and resilient turtles might have a fighting chance-if they wash up on new beaches, and deliver a new generation back there 30 or 40 years hence. But what conditions will await them?

The biggest factor blighting the future of the marine turtle is how warming sands will affect the embryos of the next generation. Variations in the temperature of the sand where the eggs are laid determine whether the hatchling that emerges is male or female, as well as influencing its physical strength.

Destiny – in terms of gender and physical rigour – is determined by a tight thermal range. If the eggs incubate in conditions that are too warm, the ratio swings strongly to production of females. Too hot, and the hatchlings don’t emerge at all. Present sand temperatures have already reached the point where they strongly skew sex ratios towards females. It might be 30 years or more before the consequences become apparent, but the fear is that heating sands might doom the turtles within a generation or two.

Led by Mariana Fuentes, a James Cook University team working up in the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef has been evaluating the various climatic threats facing the green turtles.. Under the worst-case scenarios for climate change – which is pretty much the trajectory we are on – sea-level rise, and the consequent impact on nesting sites, shapes up as the biggest threat for the turtles from now until 2030. But by 2070, the models anticipate sands will have reached a temperature which would bring about a near-complete feminisation of hatchlings. A few male enclaves are likely to survive where conditions provide some respite from the heat. But the overall picture is grim.

Now I’m no scientist ( neither is Chandler) but the obvious question occurs to me here and that is just how many males do you need to continue the turtle species in question, because this is not a species that forms enduring or exclusive  pair bonds so one male can provide the necessary sperm to multiple females.    Further, given the fact that these animals are very long lived it should not matter that much is there is a gender imbalance even over several years. Of course this extract does not even consider these issues, preferring instead to imply that like human beings turtles need a roughly equal number of males and females. Chandler assumes that the temperature is going to be inexorably rising  and that the conditions now will not be reversed. This is precisely the sort of “polar bears are doomed by climate change”  argument that other alarmists have often made and carries precisely the same fault, namely that its authors assume that nature is far less resilient than it has proven to be time and again. After all the proxies that the warming alarmists  rely upon  tell us that in the thousands of years that the turtles have been on the planet that  the climate has been both hotter and colder than it is now and guess what, the turtles have survived…

Of course the other problem facing Chandler’s chances of the book being well received, or that it will earn back any advance paid by the publisher, is   quite simply the fact that  the Warminista dogma has peaked and  it is in serious decline both here and overseas. Prior to “Climategate” scandal or even the disastrous climate conference in Copenhagen a book like this might just have stood a chance of success but  in the current climate (pun intended) its my guess that this book will quickly be relegated to the remainder bins and  bargain tables of our bookshops, and rightly so. So with two strike outs expected from Jo Chandler we might just see that Melbourne University Press would not be giving her a third go at being published.
Cheers Comrades