Jennifer Marohasy

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jennifer

Climate Update: November 2011

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Dear all.

Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter (ca. 1.3 MB) with meteorological information updated to November 2011:
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_November_2011.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.

Previous (since March 2009) issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/

All the best, yours sincerely,
Ole Humlum

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography
Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
Norway

All I Want for Christmas…

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is for you to sign the petition here: http://petitions.listentous.org.au/detail/index/pid/17

RIVERS NEED ESTUARIES CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED

Biologist Dr Jennifer Marohasy has launched the Australian Environment Foundation, AEF, campaign’Rivers Need Estuaries’ to have the current Murray Darling Basin Authority draft plan completely revised to prioritise restoring the Murray River estuary.

Dr Marohasy announced that the campaign’s petition would call on the federal parliament to recognise the estuary should be restored by re-engineering or removing the 7.6 kilometres of barrages, in part or whole, to allow inflows from the Southern Ocean.

The AEF maintains that restoring the estuary through removal of the barrages should be the priority of the basin plan as it would allow for savings of hundreds of gigalitres of water during times of drought, water currently wasted attempting to maintain artificial levels of freshwater in the Lower Lakes during the last drought.

Over 800 gigalitres (equal to 800,000 Olympic swimming pools) evaporates from the Lower Lakes each year.

“Communities are being asked to give up further large amounts of water to prop up this badly managed Lower Lakes system that has been degraded by the barrages since they were completed in 1941.

“The current MDBA draft plan fails to address this fundamental issue.”

The peer-reviewed scientific literature, unlike many recent government reports, recognises that the barrages have destroyed the estuary.

The campaign has the support of communities across the basin as they face further cuts to water allocations without any specific environmental benefits so far articulated in the draft plan.

The Rivers Need Estuaries campaign petition to be tabled in the House of Representatives details the major objectives of the campaign.

This petition of concerned citizens of Australia draws to the attention of the House:

Despite past dire predictions, the Murray Darling Basin has not been lost to salt or drought. However, upstream water storages are not large enough to keep the Lower Lakes supplied with adequate freshwater during protracted drought. Furthermore, the 7.6 kilometres of concrete barrages that created this artificial freshwater system have destroyed the Coorong-Murray River estuary. 


The petitioners request that the Australian parliament recognise that: 


1. Restoring the Coorong-Murray River estuary must be a priority in any Murray Darling Basin Plan.

2. The estuary should be restored by re-engineering or removing the barrages in part or whole to allow inflows from the Southern Ocean.

3. Adelaide’s water supply can be secured by building a lock downstream from Tailem Bend.

THEREFORE – We petition the members of the House to act to restore the natural estuarine environment of the Lower Lakes and Coorong.

Sign the petition here: http://petitions.listentous.org.au/detail/index/pid/17

’cause it’s all I want for Christmas.

Season’s Greetings

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This brilliant red, waxy toadstool is the fruiting body of an inconspicuous fungus that thrives on leaf litter, rotting wood and soil in the rainforests of North Queensland when the weather starts to warm up…  which is usually towards Christmas time in Australia. The image was sent to me by Neil Hewett from Cooper Creek Wilderness with best wishes for Christmas.  www.ccwild.com

 

 

 

 

 

More Adjusting of Temperature Records

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Hi Jen,

For some time I’ve been popping in to your blog to relate my region’s monthly weather extremes, based on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s own records. The highlight was always the mean monthly maximum, since every month had its hottest max between 1910 and 1919, with the exception of August, which was hottest in 1946. These are the records as they have stood for many years on the the Elders website under Kempsey climatology. http://www.eldersweather.com.au/nsw/mid-north-coast/kempsey

No more!

The hottest months by mean max have all been changed. Every single one. If you look at the fine print, you’ll find the explanation: the temp data is now from 1965 to 2010. No doubt the BOM can adduce good scientific reasons for this…and who reads fine print anyway?

So there you have it: our searing decade around WW1 has not been eliminated from memory by any Orwellian measures.

It’s just been taken off the page.

If a careless reader might think those were cooler times – his own fault!

To add to the perfectly legal distortion, our rainfall records extend from 1882 to 2010, so a careless reader might think the temp records also fall within that period. The only downside of this for the BOM: all our monthly records for drought were set between 1882 and 1957. I wonder when all that will be removed from the page, with a little fine print in explanation.

Thought this might interest.
Appreciate your work mightily.

Rob

Sceptic’s Computers Seized by Police

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“AN Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.

I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something…”

Read more here: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/

And some context follows from ianl8888…

“THE person who is dumping Climategate email tranches onto the net is known by the acronym FOIA (he chose this). The CG1 tranche appeared in November 2009, just before the Copenhagen Festival of Light; the CG2 tranche appeared in November 2011, just before the Durban Festival.

Tallbloke (whose machines were confiscated by the Norfolk police for a 90 day period) runs a climate blog. FOIA posted a comment with a download link on Tallbloke’s blog. The download link was for the CG2 (Climategate 2) email tranche. To my knowledge, 2 other blogs were also recipients of a comment + CG2 download link.

Norfolk police had a warrant to “search and seize” Tallboy’s machines. In the end, they took 2 laptops and a router for the 90 day period of the Warrant. The intention, according to the Police comment, is to clone the discs and then examine for service logs etc to try and trace FOIA (what on earth they thought his router would tell them is beyond me; perhaps it was charged with trafficking in stolen goods)

The problems with this are many and obvious, but the essential point of trying to trace FOIA this way has no hope because Tallboke’s blog runs off WordPress (common to blogs) so any real FOIA trace can only be found in WordPress’ server logs in the US. The FOIA comment + download link had as an email return a Russian server (as did the CG1 dump)

WordPress (US) had been requested by the US DoJ (Dept of Justice) to “freeze” all server logs covering the period when the CG2 comment + link was dropped. Again, these logs will only return the address of the Russian server – which has been known since Nov 2009.

Tallbloke (who has a daytime job at the University of Leeds) is not accused of, or charged with, anything. But the greenie gutter press (eg The Guardian) have smearily reported this as if he was. As one consequence of gutter press reporting, Tallbloke’s job is on the line.

Other concerns are that the police may “find” things on the discs, or when the discs are finally returned, Tallboy may “find” things on them.

Make of it what you will. This post is to put facts out there in an effort to avoid the usual arm-waving smears. My real comfort here is that such ham-fisted policing after 2 years, means that FOIA is still as far away from them as ever. But the concept of police search & seizure because someone else unknown to you drops a comment on your website is not a storm in a teacup. This could easily happen to Jennifer here.

Cohenite has made some comments elsewhere on what he sees as the legal situation here in Australia. Current, analagous situations are the Age dustup in Melbourne over leaked information from the ALP headquarters; and Wikileaks. My prediction here is that people will cherry-pick their “moral” stance according to their bias … eg. Assange is a hero, but Tallbloke deserves everything that happens to him.”

Thanks Ian.

And in my opinion this is a big deal, not so much that they have hassled Tallbloke, but what it signifies in particular that the US and British police can’t find my hero ‘FOIA’.

No Climate Debt Owed to Developing Countries: International Climate Science Coalition

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Ottawa, Canada, December 11, 2011: “Developed nations are not guilty of causing the climate change that developing nations claim they are suffering,” said Tom Harris, executive director of ICSC which is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. “Climate changes all the time—both warming and cooling—due to natural causes and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. However, to the degree possible, and considering our economic circumstances, developed nations still have a moral obligation to devote a proportion of their foreign aid to helping the world’s most vulnerable people adapt to natural climate events.”

[Read more…] about No Climate Debt Owed to Developing Countries: International Climate Science Coalition