MAGAZINE OUTNOW!

man in Australia as the federal government’s attorney-general for a time?

Unbelievable.

Margrette Young Dorroughby

Adults only

In January this year the federal minister for youth invited young people 16–24 to apply to join groups to advise on matters relating to youth. The NSW government already has a youth advisory council.

Don’t they know that we grown-ups have been managing youth matters like mental health, education, and climate change perfectly well without that sort of interference?

Before you know it they’ll be telling us to change the date of ANZAC Day and to replace it with a celebration of peace!

Sandra Heilpern Bangalow

Round and round

The proposed Byron Shire Water Strategy references again the importance of the reuse of treated wastewater. Such a strategy is important because it would reduce the demand on potable (drinking) water and reduce the amount of effluent leaving the sewage treatment plants (STP) for our waterways.

Back in the nineties

Byron Shire Council (BSC) supposedly had a reuse policy in place. Process monitoring was carried out weekly on wastewater operations to assist operators to improve the performance of their wastewater treatment plants and supply the best quality of effluent possible. To achieve that quality, testing was carried out at a NATAregistered laboratory owned by BSC. A substantial sum of ratepayers’ money was spent to get this laboratory registered. The laboratory was a BSC asset. The potential for this laboratory not only to do work for Council but also to carry out testing for the private sector and thus generate revenue was self-evident.

Words matter

I looked up the word ‘woke’ after Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis bragged: ‘Florida is where woke goes to die’.

Woke is an AfricanAmerican adjective meaning ‘well informed, aware and alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’.

stutter. Left means being left behind or forgotten.

Right on the other hand is correct and proper. So when the press refer to the political right, there is an in-built bias that this is the right side to vote for and identify with.

So, why was the laboratory closed in 2008? The type of testing done by a NATA-registered laboratory is critical to monitoring the quality of wastewater destined for reuse.

I was invited to join the Water, Waste & Sewer Advisory Committee (WW&SAC) by Simon Richardson. The first meeting of the committee was held in 2017. I asked a question of the utility manager in W&R: ‘Did W&R still have a reuse policy and was W&R actively pursuing new recipients to take reuse?’. The answer from the utility manager was: ‘No’. Not one of the four councillors present asked: ‘Why not?’

Anyone who wants to see the amount of reuse being generated from sewage treatment plants can go to the BSC Water & Recycling website, go to ‘flows’ and see the amount of treated water discharge compared to reuse being generated. The reuse figures are minuscule e.g. on 1.3.2023 treated effluent leaving BVSTP was 1,456.61kl/ day and reuse for the same day was 58.93kl/day.

We are now back to square one. Are any of Byron Shire’s councillors going to ask why we are back to square one?

Alan Dickens Ballina

Somehow, half of America made ‘woke’ a pejorative word – and the same people made ‘liberal’ a dirty word!

And how about the American term ‘minorities’ when talking about other people? The indoctrination is so total, that even minorities refer to themselves as ‘minorities’. And why are some Americans referred to as African Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans or Asian Americans? As this is the case, surely pale-skinned people should be called European Americans. Or maybe everyone could just be Americans? It might make for a more cohesive society.

Black and white is a very divisive way of describing people. Most of us are shades of brown. Race is so superficial it’s impossible to know somebody’s ‘race’ from their DNA. In one family there can be a range of different features and pigments. As if it damn well matters.

And what about left and right to describe opposing political factions? The Latin word for left is ‘sinister’ and the left hand is considered the hand of the devil. For centuries Catholic schoolchildren have been punished for being left-handed. King George VI was naturally left-handed, and as a student was forced to write with his right hand, which caused his debilitating

Right-wing think tanks come up with masterful weasel words to describe and justify the excesses of neoliberal economic policies. Take ’neoliberal’ itself – what is there not to like? Neo means ‘new’ and liberal means ‘generous’. Yet neoliberal economic policies are tearing society apart and causing an ever-widening wealth gap. ‘Economic rationalism’ is another weasel word suggesting that anyone opposed to neoliberal policies is irrational.

And how about negative growth? This oxymoron is used when an economy contracts – because the term ‘negative growth’ doesn’t impact the stock market like the word ‘recession’ might. And when billions get wiped off the value of shares it’s called a ‘correction’.

To conserve something means to protect it from harm or destruction. But ‘conservatives’ are more likely to over-exploit resources. In the face of global warming, being conservative means business as usual. Conservatives might more correctly be described as radical reactionaries, while the so-called left might better be called progressives. Maybe it’s time to rethink words that have so much impact on our lives?

Michael Balson

What’s all this about the solar maximum?

Cosmos Magazine

Arecent uptick in solar activity and its effects on infrastructure on and around Earth has raised concern about how the upcoming solar maximum will affect technology.

So, what’s going on?

Our cyclic Sun

The Sun has an approximately 11-year cycle of higher solar activity driven by the flipping of its magnetic field. The beginning of these cycles is known as a ‘solar minimum’ – when solar activity is at its lowest – and the middle is known as the ‘solar maximum’ – when the Sun has the highest number of sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) and, therefore is most active.

Our Sun, like all active stars, is a burning ball of gas and plasma. At its surface, temperatures can reach more than 5,000°C. At its nuclear fusion reactor core, the Sun is burning at temperatures greater than a million degrees.

So, it’s no surprise that there are violent interactions taking place.

Among these outbursts are solar flares, which are large eruptions of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun’s surface. These mysterious phenomena tend to take place in active regions in the presence of strong magnetic fields typically associated with sunspots.

CMEs are huge ejections of the solar magnetic field. These expulsions take with them huge amounts of plasma, ionising matter and shoot high-energy charged particles at great velocity into space.

Solar winds are streams of charged particles released from the Sun’s corona – a layer of superheated plasma, mostly consisting of electrons, in the Sun’s upper atmosphere.

Scientists have been tracking the solar cycle since 1755. We are now entering the solar maximum of Cycle 25 which is expected to peak in 2024–25. Solar Cycle 25 began in December 2019.

‘At the moment, we’re seeing the rise of Solar Cycle 25. And it’s exceeded the forecasts that were made,’ solar astrophysicist at the University of Sydney, Professor Mike Wheatland, tells Cosmos. ‘It looks like it’s on track to be about as big as Cycle 23.’ Cycle 23, 1996–2008, peaked in 2001.

Know your ABCs and Ms and Xs

When CMEs collide with Earth’s magnetosphere – the region of space around the Earth that is produced by our planet’s magnetic field – they can cause geomagnetic storms and aurorae.

These storms are rated G1 to G5. Disturbances from high-energy particles from solar activity can also cause radio blackouts which are similarly scaled R1 to R5.

Solar flares fall into categories labelled A, B, C, M or X where each subsequent letter represents a flare with 10 times more energy than the previous letter. The number following the letter marks the number of times stronger than the weakest solar flare in that category. For example, an X2 flare is twice as powerful as an X1.

Increased solar activity has already led to technological disruptions on Earth in the last 18 months.

February 2022 saw 38 of SpaceX’s 49 ‘Starlink’ satellites fall out of the sky due to a G1-class storm from a CME. An M8-class solar flare in September released a pulse of X-rays and extreme UV radiation which caused a shortwave radio blackout in Africa and the Middle East for up to an hour. Earlier this month, an X1 solar flare caused a 30-minute highfrequency radio blackout across the Pacific Ocean and western US.

Solar activity in history

The greatest solar flare incident of the last 500 years occurred on 1 September, 1859 and is known as the ‘Carrington Event.’ Scientists estimate that the solar flare that caused it was an X45 ejection.

Skies all over the planet were bathed in red, green and purple auroras, even in the tropics. Telegraph systems were disrupted, and their operators electrocuted, setting telegraph papers on fire.

In 1972, a solar flare knocked out long-distance US telephone communication. A 1989 solar flare knocked out power for six million Canadians for nine hours. An X5-class solar flare in 2000 (as Cycle 23 was reaching its maximum) caused radio blackouts and short-circuited satellites.

Solar Cycle 25

Overall, the experts agree the peak of this cycle is expected to be ‘moderate.’

‘During the solar maximum, the Sun is expected to emit 4 to 6 flares of varying intensity and direction per day,’ says Alister Graham, a professor of astronomy at Melbourne’s Swinburne University.

‘Predicting solar cycles is fraught,’ Dr Marc Duldig, a physicist at the University of Tasmania, told Cosmos. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be a particularly violent solar maximum. Nothing like we were getting in the 1960s or ’70s.’

‘Although we haven’t reached the peak of Solar Cycle 25 yet, there’s already more sunspots than the previous solar cycle,’ says University of Newcastle physicist Dr Hannah Schunker. ‘It’s going to be larger than the previous one but in the big scheme of things, it’s probably going to be fairly moderate.’

‘To get a severe space weather storm, there’s a whole sequence of events that have to happen,’ Wheatland adds. ‘There could be a severe space weather storm occurring during this solar cycle, there could be a couple of them.’

Duldig notes that it ‘is a bit of a probability game.’

‘This is a really tough problem and we’re working really hard on it,’ Schunker notes. ‘One of the issues is you can’t make an experiment with the Sun.’