Should we laugh or cry?
Reading the local press lately reminds me of Montaigne's saying, that if an optimist looks at the actions of man he laughs and if a pessimist looks at the actions of man, he cries.
I certainly don't know whether to laugh or cry.
The front page of the last Peninsula News tells us that a sea barrier is called for.
The Woolwich Barrier, built in the early 80s, cost hundreds of millions of pounds and it was to protect London, the capital city of the UK.
It was out of date within 25 years and needed to be heightened.
Just which government here is likely to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars in order to protect the Peninsula?
What would the people of Hardys Bay and Ettalong think of living next to what looks like an industrial site?
Sea walls have been built in many places around the world.
We have seen them on the east coast of Britain and on the east coast of the USA.
These walls simply moved the problem further along the coast, which resulted in many houses being lost to the seas.
We can see a similar effect on the Peninsula.
The Council changed the point at the boat ramp with rocks, in the mid-70s, which changed the currents and so the wide beach where my children learned to swim, next to the Vietnamese Memorial, has disappeared almost completely.
At Kingscliff in northern NSW, a caravan park and a surf club are in danger of being lost, despite enormous rocks and sandbags being strategically placed, as well as large earthmovers pushing the sand in, to form an artificial dune.
If we move further up the estuary we come to the site of Gosford Landing, the new city of Gosford, to be built right beside or even on the water.
The State Government, the local Council and the Regional Development Corporation are determined that it will go ahead regardless of what people think.
They want business as usual.
So, do these two groups of people live on different planets?
Should we laugh or cry?
Isn't it time for us to look at the facts?
Climate change is here whether we like it or not.
It is not a religion or a fashion which we can acknowledge or ignore.
Climate scientists wish that it were.
They do not like what the evidence is telling them.
The State Government may have removed the information from the S149 certificates but our insurance premiums do not reflect this.
The insurance industry is one part of our business community which is facing up to the truth.
It is time surely for us all to check the facts and then deal with the problem seriously and in earnest and to demand that our governments do likewise.
Email, 21 Dec 2012
Margaret Lund, Woy Woy Bay