Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for November 21, 2007

Some Time by the Murray River

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I have enjoyed spending the last couple of weeks living on a bank of the Murray River just upstream of Barham.

The bird life is especially amazing with wood ducks in the river, white ibis, sulphur-crested cockatoos and galahs on the lawn, superb blue wrens in the bush outside my office window, swift parrots in the red gums and very black ravens drinking out of the bird bath.

I saw a lot of black swans when I visited the salt evaporation ponds at Wakool. I saw a shag in the Gunbower Forest. There were two pelicans at the Toorrumbarry Weir.

Pelicans ver 2 (copy Redgum 113).jpg
Just downstream of the Toorumbarry Weir, November 6, 2007

I have started most days with a large glass of Murray River water and on the best days finish with a swim in the river.

While many of the forests, tributaries and anabranches in this Murray Valley section of the long Murray River are suffering from a lack of water, the river itself is running strongly with releases from Hume Dam at the top of the system destined for South Australia at the other end.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I’m off to Sydney.

Thanks Faye and Ken for your hospitality! And Daryl, I took photographs at Riverdale this morning which I will post at this blog in the next week or two with comment from the MDBC report.

2000 Years of Global Temperatures

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Loehle-2007-plus-HadCRUT3.gif

Roy Spencer has taken Craig Loehle’s 2000 year temperature reconstruction to 1995 and added the HadCRUT3 to 2007. Obviously, the proxy temperature reconstructions during the Medieval Warm Period would have larger error bars than the current (instrumental) temperatures, so one shouldn’t put too much emphasis on small differences between the current peak and the MWP peaks.

Roy Spencer also looked at what the HadCRUT3 trace would look like if temperatures now remained constant for another 15 years (until 2022)…in that case, the temperature trace almost reaches the +0.6 deg C line (just barely
exceeding the warmest MWP peak).

We can clearly see that the coldest part of the Little Ice Age was unprecedented in the past 2000 years, and the subsequent recovery to the Modern Warm Period.