Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for May 2011

Oceans Not Warming as Predicted

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The NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) has updated its Ocean Heat Content (OHC) data (0-700Meters) for the first quarter of 2011.

The oceans are not warming as the experts predicted.

This is another good reason for governments across the Western world to start reassess the advice they have been receiving on climate change and to start seeking out the opinions of the many meteorologist, climatologists, paleoclimatologists and hydrologists who are sceptical of anthropogenic global warming.

Via Anthony Watts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/08/the-new-giss-divergence-problem-ocean-heat-content/#more-39512

A Note from the Daintree

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Hello Jennifer,

Tourism in the Daintree Rainforest is continuing to decline, partly because of the relative value of the Australian dollar.

Recent upturns in the global economy have been met with a proportionate recovery in other parts of Australia, but the far north seems to have suffered the double whammy of natural disasters which have been overly-publicised to the extent that many travellers to Australia are still shying away from Queensland.

The challenge for the people of the Daintree Rainforest is to get the word out that we are enjoying unobstructed accessibility, are open for business and waiting to showcase the rich diversity of experiences that make a great nature-based holiday in the oldest rainforest in the world.

If you feel inclined to assist, kindly forward this eNewsletter onto a friend who may be considering travelling in the not too distant future…
[Read more…] about A Note from the Daintree

At Today’s Rally

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A few well known Queensland sceptics of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ attended the ‘No Carbon Tax’ rally today in Brisbane…  and there is also a frequent contributor to this  blog in this photograph. 

There were perhaps 400 at the rally. 

I suggested government needed to look around for better advice on climate change reminding the crowd that Tim Flannery once said that our dams would never fill again.  

Of course when the drought broke the dams filled to overflowing with Wivenhoe flooding Brisbane.   At that time government should have reassessed the quality of the advice it was getting on climate change, but instead and incredibly the Prime Minister Julia Gillard promoted Professor Flannery…  at a time when he should really have been sacked.

No Wiser After Decades of Climate Modelling

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“AN outcome from the anthropogenic global warming alarmism has been the implementation of government policies that can only reduce community resilience to the natural hazards of climate. The enormous research expenditure directed toward computer modelling and potential impacts has been at the expense of better understanding of the climate system and improved early warning of known hazardous events. None of the expenditure on climate change research over the past three decades has improved our ability to better understand and predict the onset and duration of drought, of tropical cyclones, conditions conducive to fire, or the extent of flooding. Yet each of these has been experienced across parts of Australia over the past 12 months, with significant loss of life, enormous private and public infrastructure destruction, and diminution of productivity.

“Proposed Government actions to make energy more expensive, or raise barriers that deny community access to existing energy forms, will further reduce community resilience to the hazards of climate. Today’s broad-acre farming is an outcome of mechanised production and transport based on fossil fuels; rural infrastructure is implemented and maintained with equipment driven by fossil fuels. From an economist’s perspective, rural industries are a diminishing percentage of GDP and of declining importance to national welfare. This jaundiced view fails to understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we self-actualise (ie, expand the national GDP) only after satisfying our basic wants of food and shelter. A community that neglects what underpins the resilience of basic food production and infrastructure becomes more vulnerable to climate variability and extremes…    an extract from ‘Community resilience and the hazards of climate’, by William Kininmonth

Read more here:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11986&page=0

See you at the Rally in Brisbane, on Saturday

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GROWING up in Brisbane thirty years ago I attended People for Nuclear Disarmament rallies and was part of the protest when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was awarded an honorary doctorate. This Saturday I will be returning to Brisbane to be a part of the No Carbon Tax Rally.

Politics is very different now. Some of my old Moreton Island Protection Committee friends have gone on to successful careers within the environment movement where it is now possible to have a well-paid and respectable job for life.

They have become part of the establishment, while the No Carbon Tax Rally will be attended by what the same establishment increasingly and unfairly label “misfits and oddballs”.

It is certainly unfashionable to be a global warming sceptic but that doesn’t make it wrong. Indeed while global warming may now be considered the great moral issue of our time, in another thirty years the current obsession with carbon dioxide may be recognised as misguided.

During the recent protracted drought when Wivenhoe Dam was at 17 per cent capacity and falling, Tim Flannery wrote in New Scientist that because of global warming the dams would never fill again – not even when it rained. I can understand why governments concerned by such advice tried to introduce an emissions trading scheme.

But since, the drought has broken, and the dams have filled – in the case of Wivenhoe to overflowing.

But instead of reassessing the evidence, the Prime Minister Julia Gillard, has appointed Professor Flannery, the very man who claimed the drought would last forever, to head up a new Climate Commission.

Reminiscent of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen days, governments are again treating the Australian public as fools. The ideology is still extreme and based on nonsense – just different.

We live in a land of drought or flooding rains and so governments need to take natural climate cycles seriously and to recognise that the bigger our cities, the greater the risk of running out of water or being washed away – unless we plan appropriately.

Banning certain categories of light-bulb, or even introducing a carbon tax, is not going to return the Australian climate to some sort of benevolent natural state.

So I am travelling to Brisbane to be a part of the No Carbon Tax Rally on Saturday.

It is my opportunity to very publically show my concern for current government climate policy.

I would like government to stop treating climate as a slogan and cast around a little wider for advice including by listening to the many well qualified meteorologists, hydrologists and paleoclimatologists whose more accurate forecasts have so far been ignored – because they don’t believe carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate change.

The proposed tax will not stop climate change and the way it is currently being formulated it will not even reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

See you at the rally!

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Republished from The Courier Mail, May 5, 2011 pg 29

The Rally is this Saturday outside Parliament House, from 11.30am. Parliament House is in the Brisbane CBD at the corner of George and Alice Street. Don’t forget to bring a sign and also your extended families.

Why is Government Ignoring Advice from International Water Expert?

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NEIL Eagle grows oranges and beef cattle on the flood plains of the Central Murray Valley near Barham. He was once involved in water politics as a former president of Australian Citrus Growers and former chair of the Murray Lower Darling River Management Board. Now he is angered by it all and particularly the new proposed Basin Plan.

“While government can ignore my advice,” he says, “I would expect them to at least consider the advice of their own international water expert, Professor John Briscoe.”

Neil recently wrote:

“IN 2010 Professor John Briscoe, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering at Harvard University and leader of the Harvard Water Program, was engaged as a member of the High-Level External Review Panel convened by the Murray Darling Basin Commission to review the draft Guide to the Basin Plan. Many of his comments in an invited submission to the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs of the Senate Inquiry remain extremely relevant.

In reference to claims by Malcolm Turnbull that “our water management has been extraordinarily ill informed in years past”, Professor Briscoe responsed,

“I found (and find) this diagnosis (a) extraordinarily widespread and (b) extraordinarily erroneous. What is obvious to me is that the overwhelming factor behind the dismal situation in the MD Basin was the dramatic reduction in rainfall and even larger reduction in river flows. It is equally clear to me that the Institutional Response (of the Murray Darling Basin Commission, that basin states, and farmers) was extraordinarily innovative and – within the bounds set by nature – effective. Not only for the economy but, as shown by the National Water Commission, for ameliorating the environmental damage of the terrible drought.”

The pressure of the environmental vote at the 2007 Federal election led to the utilisation of the Ramsar Convention, as the legal basis for usurping state powers with the constitutional amendments in the Water Act 2007.

Professor Briscoe commented,

“I have come to see opportunistic politics as a major factor in the development of the Water Act of 2007 and the current impasse.

And so the fundamentals of the Act were born – an environmental act in which Canberra would tell states and communities and farmers what to do.”

The framers of the Water Act 2007 had not read their Churchill. Democracy is, indeed, the worst form of government, except from all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Yes, the consultative, participatory model of the MDB Commission did have its flaws, because consensus was difficult and often slow. But it is now obvious that the commonwealth-bureaucrats–and–scientists–know-better–then-states-and-communities-and-farmers-do (MDBA) model has, once again, proved to be much worse and even much slower.

The highly secretive ‘we will run the numbers and the science behind closed doors and then tell you the result’ MDB Plan process was not, in my view, an aberration which can be pinned entirely on the leadership of the MDBA Board and management, but intrinsic to the institutional power concentration that is fundamental to the Water Act 2007.

The secretive closed process effectively was denying any transparency, opportunity for knowledgeable input and rigorous review and debate.

In all my years of public service, often in very sensitive environments, I had never been subject to such an elaborate ‘confidentiality’ process as that embodied in the preparation of the Guide to the Basin Plan.

A corollary of this flawed process (and the ideas incorporated in the Act) was that there was very little recourse in the process to the immense, world-leading knowledge of water management that had developed in Australia during the last 20 years. Time and again I heard from professionals, community leaders, farmers and state politicians who made Australia the widely acknowledged world leaders in arid zone water management that they were excluded from the process.

My conclusion is stark. I believe that the Water Act of 2007 was founded on a political deception and that the original sin is responsible for most of the detour on which Australian water management now finds itself. I am well aware that unpredictability is an enemy and that there are large environmental, social, economic costs of uncertainty. But I also believe that Australia cannot find its way in water management if this Act is the guide.

I would urge the Government to start again, to re-define principles, to engage all who have a stake in this vital issue, and to produce, as rapidly as possible, a new Act which can serve Australia for generations to come. And which can put Australia back in the world leadership position in modern water management.

Neil offers the following solutions to the current mess:

1. The Water Act of 2007 must be redrafted to fully enable a balanced equal appraisal of the water needs of the Basin, as to social, economic and environmental interests and thus comply with the principles laid down in the COAG National Water Initiative.

2. MDBC Board Appointments must be made by the States. The Commissioners (Board Members) need to be again nominated by States, free of Federal input, to ensure balance and transparency, knowledge and expertise. This would re-establish that the MDB Commission which was a proven and successful model, under which Australia was acknowledged as the world leader in arid zone water management.

The only adjustment that should be reviewed may be to remove the Veto Power of any State, which can slow the decision process. This was demonstrated, once to my knowledge by South Australia vetoing the Upper States development of Dartmouth Dam for about six years only resolved with the raising of the South Australian water share component.

3. There must be proper Basin community and State water agencies involvement in the development of any balanced future Basin Plan.

4. There must be open outside Scientific assessment of the health needs of the Basin’s Rivers, with the identification of key environmental sites and of sustainable water yields.

5. The fresh water solution for the Lower Lakes in drought periods must be rejected. A weir constructed at Wellington and in periods of drought or low flows removal of the barrage boards, to allow the Lakes to revert to their natural estuarine state; with the reestablishment of the tidal prism between the lakes and the Southern Ocean.

It is totally unacceptable for the upper States to be asked to reconfigure their irrigation industry at great cost, while approximately 1 million megalitres per year is evaporated from this massive fresh water playground.

In conclusion, according to Neil:

The current direction of reform is unacceptable.

To have the new Chairman of the MDBC Craig Knowles, supported by Minister Tony Burke, indicating that they aim to draft and release a revised Basin Plan in a few months is impractical, arrogant and destined to commit the same fundamental errors of the first.

This comes after acknowledging that the first Draft Plan released in 2010 failed in the basics of: Proper community involvement; Involvement of the State agencies knowledge and expertise resources; Complete failure to properly review the assumptions in the CSIRO Sustainable Yield Assessments of Rivers which was conducted in the middle of a 10 year protracted drought; and Failure to justify the selection of key environmental sites in the Basin.

Of even greater concern is that our farm and irrigation leaders are complicit in not totally rejecting this new agenda of MDBC Chairman Knowles and Minister Bourke.

To have leaders such as Tony Windsor MP, now stating that the “pain” to the irrigators and their reliant communities will NOT be great – as already 900 to 1000 GLs has been recovered and they will only “need” to recover another 1000 to 1500 GLs, is not heartening. This effectively is still about two thirds of what was originally planned!

The desire to ‘recover’ specific water volumes has been questioned from the start with Professor John Pigram, stating at the start of the Living Murray Process, “Not one gigalitre of water should be removed from productive use unless the need of the environment can be fully justified” and the 2004 Federal House of Representative Interim Report on River Health concluding that there was NOT adequate science to justify the removal of any water from productive use!

Let us be quite clear – the proposed Basin Plan has little to do with river health or the environment, but rather a mechanism of ‘end of river flows’, to create a fresh water solution for the Lower Lakes of Alexandrina and Albert.

Neil J Eagle, Barham

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http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/201103/s3159086.htm
http://davidboydsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/harvard-professor-john-briscoe-on.html
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/legcon_ctte/provisionswateract2007/submissions.htm