Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Information

Abbot and Marohasy Join Chinese Climate Science Community

By

WESTERN science, along with western civilization appears to be in terminal decline.[1] China has shot into second place in terms of number of scientific articles that are published in international journals and Chinese scientists are set to take the top spot in the next few years.[2] Drs Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbot have joined the Chinese climate science community with a recent article in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.[3]

My name is Mr Koala and I’ve been studying all the papers listed in volume 29, number 4 of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. This is a journal sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

I asked Dr Marohasy why she didn’t have this important paper published by the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. She replied that it was sent to the Journal of Climate, amongst others, but they rejected the article, not because they had any issues with the science, but because they questioned the paper’s relevance.

Relevance!

Even a Koala, not at the top of his tree, can see the relevance.

This is a paper that shows how to forecast rainfall better than the General Circulation Models so popular with climate change scientists in the west.

That’s how relevant it is.
[Read more…] about Abbot and Marohasy Join Chinese Climate Science Community

The Long and Costly War on Carbon: Viv Forbes

By

‘The Australian government claims that next month’s tax on carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for today’s soaring costs of living.

This tax, however, is just their latest assault in the decades-long war on carbon that is already inflating the cost of everything.

For at least a decade, power companies have been obliged to source 10-15% of their power at inflated prices from costly and unreliable sources like wind and solar. And for every wind or solar plant built, a duplicate backup gas facility is needed, increasing the demand and price for backup gas, hitting other gas consumers. Moreover, the threat of more carbon taxes has deterred the construction of efficient new coal-burning power plants. Rising electricity costs feed into the cost of everything from public transport to building materials.

The climatists are also responsible for numerous policies pushing up the price of food. These include the ethanol/biofuel madness, the restrictions on the fishing industry, the Kyoto scrub clearing bans, the spread of carbon-credit forests over farming and grazing land, the never ending war on irrigators, and the virtual ban on building new water-supply dams.

Then we have all the hidden costs of the climate industry. Thousands of our smartest graduates are lured into well-paid dead-end desk jobs in the overheads industry devoted to climate red tape, while real entrepreneurs are unable to find workers to develop our continent of under-utilised resources. There is an overpaid bureaucracy devoted to climate “research”, alternate energy, international junkets, Kyoto give-aways, and administration, auditing, enforcement, accounting, law and propaganda for their empire of climate taxes and subsidies.

Finally we have income tax implications from all the money being flung around to bribe people to accept their carbon tax? Every Australian will get these bills somewhere, sometime. And who pays for the hundreds of millions poured down subsidy rat-holes like carbon capture, solar panels, pink bats and the IPCC?

Australia’s crippling carbon tax is but the latest symptom of the costly Climate Madness infecting the well-fed elite of the western world.

********
Text from Viv Forbes, photograph from Jennifer Marohasy taken near Lithgow, NSW

Alan Jones, About the Murray’s Mouth

By

Hi Alan

Re: How to Keep the Sea Mouth of the Murray River Open

I was sent a podcast from your broadcast on 2GB Sydney radio this morning talking about the Lower Lakes and the barrages (Alan Jones on 2GB on June 20, 2012). Great to hear you put the Water Minister Tony Burke straight on a few issues including explaining to him that taking water from farmers/irrigators won’t stop drought! It was also nice to be quoted by you.

You might like to also consider quoting the famous British explorer Charles Sturt who wrote in about 1840:

“Australian rivers fall rapidly from the mountains in which they originate into a level and extremely depressed country; having weak and inconsiderable sources, and being almost wholly unaided by tributaries of any kind; they naturally fail before they reach the coast, and exhaust themselves in marshes or lakes; or reach it so weakened as to be unable to preserve clear or navigable mouths, or to remove the sand banks that the tide throws up before them.”

In fact, the Murray River often ran strong in spring and summer, but by autumn had slowed and then a southwesterly wind would pick up and the sea would pour in. So, the Lower Lakes, that the Minister now wants to keep permanently fresh, were often brackish and during prolonged drought, full of seawater.

[Read more…] about Alan Jones, About the Murray’s Mouth

Away with Rio+20: The Voice of the Peasant

By

‘GOVERNMENTS from all over the world will meet in Río de Janeiro, Brasil from June 20-22 2012, to supposedly commemorate 20 years since the “Earth Summit”, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, that established for the first time a global agenda for “sustainable development”. During this summit, in 1992, three international conventions were adopted: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention to Fight Desertification. Each of these promised to initiate a series of actions destined to protect the planet and all of the life on it, and to allow all human beings to enjoy a life of dignity.

At that time , many social organizations congratulated and supported these new conventions with hope. Twenty years later, we see the real causes of environmental, economic, and social deterioration continuing without being attacked. Worse still, we are profoundly alarmed that the next meeting in June will serve to deepen neoliberal policies and processes of capitalist expansion, concentration, and exclusion that today have enveloped us in an environmental, economic, and social crisis of grave proportions. Beneath the deceptive and badly intentioned term “green economy”, new forms of environmental contamination and destruction are now rolled out along with new waves of privatization, monopolization, and expulsion from our lands and territories.

La Via Campesina will mobilize for this event, representing the voice of the peasant in the global debate and defending a different path to development that is based on the well being of all, that guarantees food for all, that protects and guarantees that the commons and natural resources are put to use to provide a good life for everyone and not to meet the needs for accumulation of a few.
[Read more…] about Away with Rio+20: The Voice of the Peasant

Away with Rio+20 and Ineptocracy

By

INEPTOCRACY is a system of government where the least capable of leading are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers. That’s according to the web-based Urban Dictionary of slang and seems to be an increasingly apt description of how Australia is governed.

The latest fiasco is the proposed closely down of an already diminished Australian fishing industry through the creation of the world’s largest marine park.

But what on earth is the purpose of having the world’s large marine park if we continue to condone the slaughter of a species of marine mammal already on the verge of extinction? There are only about 14,000 dugongs left in Great Barrier Reef waters and about 1,000 are slaughtered each year.

Dugongs are closely related to elephants, don’t calf until they are nearly twenty years old and suckle their young for up to two years. They are slaughtered by aborigines and Torres Strait islanders as part of an indigenous hunting right, never mind that the slaughter is unsustainable and inhumane.

If the Australian government really cared about the Great Barrier Reef and its dugongs, it would immediately ban the slaughter of dugongs by aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Then there is the Murray River fiasco. The buy back of vast quantities of water by the Australian government from our most efficient food producers to send to an artificial freshwater reservoir that has crippled the Murray River’s estuary and all ostensibly to save the environment.

Before the sea dykes that dammed the estuary, each autumn when the southwesterly winds picked up, the Southern Ocean would push into Lake Alexandrina. So the lake was sometimes fresh and some brackish and during prolonged drought it was full of seawater. A mainstay of local fishery was mulloway, a large fish with a golden sheen, but there are no mulloway anymore.

Before the sea dykes were built across the five channels that converge on the Murray’s sea mouth, mulloway would hangout in the underwater canyons beyond the Murray’s mouth. As though reluctant to come in, then on a big tide and a full moon large schools would race through the inlet between the sand dunes. The year the sea dykes were sealed, the mulloway came in and then were trapped, on each ebbing tide, churning in the channels below the sea dykes. There is an old photograph of the Goolwa wharf groaning under 160 tonnes of dead mulloway.

If the Australian government really cared about fish it would restore the 75,000 hectares of terminal coastal lagoon at the bottom of the Murray Darling by removing the sea dykes.

But it doesn’t really care about dugongs or mulloway.

In our ineptocracy, real and pressing environmental issues are ignored while governments legislate against productive and sustainable industries.

Over the next few days the mainstream media are going to tell us stories about the Rio+20 conference, a place in South America where Australia’s richest environmental groups and government bureaucrats are gathering with other such groups and governments from around the world. They are gathering ostensibly to solve the environmental problems of the world by promoting a new economic order through a new political document for our future.

A majority of those attending will likely represent the least capable of leading meaningful change and the least capable of contributing in a practical way to a productive society, and their very attendance will be a consequence of the taxing of a diminishing number of productive and sustainable industries.

And not one of the many delegates from Australia has ever shown the slightest interest in any of our real environmental issues including the restoration of the Murray River’s estuary or saving our dugongs.

 

************

I took the picture of Green Island shown above from the window of one of those small Dash 8 aeroplanes on my way to Cairns last week. From Cairns I ventured north to the Daintree and went looking for cassowaries with Neil Hewett.

… only my second YouTube movie. Thanks to all who donated to Mr Koala’s fundraising appeal, we purchased the video camera with some of the monies raised.

My very first YouTube movie is here…

Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline

By

Dear Friend,

Despite that salutation, I can’t be found on Facebook nor can you follow me on Twitter, BUT you CAN read my book:

Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline

which lays bare the corruption of our institutions of higher learning as a result of 20 years of rampant managerialism, baseless education theory and overt government interference.

As part of the education sector, you owe it to yourself and your students to revive the system while there are still signs of life.

Please use the link below to download your FREE digital copy. Feel free to pass this email on to anyone you know who might also be interested.

http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/

Best of Reading.

Sincerely,
Donald Meyers