Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Any more than guesswork?

Minister ignored parrot advice - National - theage.com.au

While what went on behind Senator Ian Campbell's decision to not approve a new Victorian wind farm is no doubt interesting, this part of the report seems odd:

While refusing to comment on why the departmental briefing paper would not be released, a spokeswoman for said Senator Campbell had based his decision on a publicly available report by consultants Biosis Research, which warned that orange-bellied parrots face extinction within 50 years. There are only about 200 left.

Yet the same Biosis Research report also predicted that the risk of any parrots being killed at the Bald Hills site was extremely low.

According to the Biosis risk analysis, the worst-case scenario would result in one parrot being killed at Bald Hills every 667 years. In the best-case scenario, that would fall to one being killed every 1097 years.

How on earth would you forecast with any high degree of accuracy the rate of bird kill for a particular species in an area that has not had a wind farm in it before?

Sounds like rubbery figures to me.

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