Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

A Land of Drought or Flooding Rains

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EASTER Sunday in 1915 the community of Murrabit in the Central Murray Valley gathered for a picnic at a farm called Riversdale.   It had been so dry that the Murray River had run dry. 

 A photograph was taken of the buggies in the dry river bed. 

Today, March 9, 2011, I visited Riversdale and took a photograph of the Murray in flood.  

The third photograph shows me looking across to the exact spot where the buggies were parked in 1915. Water now extends for another 5 miles beyond the far river bank into the red gum forests.

What to Listen to, Read, and Action This Week

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 1. The truth about water planning in the Murray Darling Basin:
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/water-issues/axe-murraydarling-plan-and-start-again-us-expert-20110304-1bi62.html

2.  Marian Wilkinson reports on the tough political decisions ahead in the fight over the biggest water reform in Australian history. “Backlash in the Basin” goes to air Monday 7 March, 8.30pm on ABC 1. It is replayed on Tuesday 8th March at 11.35 pm.  http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/

3.  Protests in each city are being organised against the Carbon Tax on Wednesday March 23. 
For more information:

Stop Gillard’s carbon tax page  http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_113660108709587#!/pages/Stop-Gillards-Carbon-Tax/197122506973202

 Revolt against the carbon tax page http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_113660108709587

 Petition against the carbon tax page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-Gillards-Carbon-Tax/197122506973202?sk=app_4949752878

4.  And later this week I will be posting more on electricity generation from Tony.

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Consider this an open thread.  Let other readers of this blog know what you are watching, listening to, and reading, this week by way of a comment.

And consider donating to the continued operation of this blog.   There is an orange button at the top right hand corner of this page.   Much thanks to those who have made a donation recently.

This blog is about community, and access to information.  Information that is not politically correct or even fashionable…  But hopefully well considered.

It Never Rains

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“POETRY, said Auden, makes nothing happen. Usually it doesn’t, but sometimes a poem gets quoted in a national argument because everybody knows it, or at least part of it, and for the occasion a few lines of familiar poetry suddenly seem the best way of summing up a viewpoint…

“Before the floods, proponents of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) view had argued that there would never be enough rain again, because of Climate Change. When it became clear that there might be more than enough rain, the view was adapted: the floods, too, were the result of Climate Change. In other words, they were something unprecedented. Those opposing this view — those who believed that in Australia nothing could be less unprecedented than a flood unless it was a drought — took to quoting Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’… 

Read more from Clive James here http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3743/full

[Via Neville]

Getting Rid of Cars

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“You’ve heard of warning labels on things like beer and cigarettes, but how about automobiles? Well believe it or not, a British Parliament member, Collin Challen, recently proposed placing warning labels on cars to inform consumers of their impact on, you guessed it, global warming. According to the UK Guardian, such warnings might include highlighting the auto’s contribution to sea level rise, increasing deaths, species extinctions, food and water shortages, and heightened regional conflicts and wars. These warnings would vary depending on the emissions from each vehicle, according to the British MP, with the worst gas-guzzlers carrying the most severe warnings…

“Marc Morano, editor of CFACT’s Climate Depot website, appeared on Fox News with Neil Cavuto yesterday to discuss the recent spike in oil and gas prices in the wake of instability in the Middle East.

“Cavuto asked why, instead of getting oil from Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and other Middle East countries, America doesn’t drill for more oil domestically. Morano replied, ‘The Congressional Research Service just did a study of natural gas, coal, and oil. We have more than the entire world, we have more than China, Canada, and Saudi Arabia combined, but 83 percent of our lands are inaccessible for oil drilling. And we have the Interior Department held in contempt of court for not allowing more permitting out in the Gulf Coast.’

“Marc pointed out that many environmentalists view high gas prices as a good thing: ‘Many people, including the environmentalists, are getting exactly what they want right now, and it is a situation they helped create by locking up 83 percent of our oil…'”

“What would life be like without cars? Well for residents of Vauban, Germany, living without cars is a reality – as the town has now become a showcase for the latest utopian vision of suburban planners. In Vauban, there is no more parallel parking or squeezing your car into a garage bursting with lawn equipment and bicycles. That’s because over 80 percent of those living in Vauban have no cars.  Now city officials do give people the option of car ownership – if they don’t mind paying a $40,000 dollar permit fee…”

Via http://www.cfact.org/

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More about Vauban:
http://www.vauban.de/info/abstract.html

Belief in the Truth of a Theory

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I wrote these two laws down on a scrap of paper years ago. I still have the scrap of paper but not the original reference.    They seem relevant to dicussions about power stations, the Murray River and especially the universe.  

Harris’s First Law:

Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science.

Harris’s Second Law:

The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much he knows, and inversely proportional to how much he believes.

—————-
posted August 04, 2005
posted May 09, 2008
posted October 14, 2010

What to Listen to, And Read, This Week

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Here is a clever video about what is wrong with government’s latest planning scheme for the Murray Darling Basin.

Interestingly Topher has quoted extensively from my 2003 monograph ‘Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’.

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Consider this an open thread. Let other readers of this blog know what you are watching, listening to, and reading, this week by way of a comment.

And consider donating to the continued operation of this blog. There is an orange button at the top right hand corner of this page.

This blog is about community, and access to information. Information that is not politically correct or even fashionable… But hopefully well considered.