Jennifer Marohasy

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Brown Leaves Greens

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ON Friday, the leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, announced he was stepping down and also retiring from Australian federal politics.

Miranda Devine has a piece in today’s Herald Sun that begins:

“THE intergalactic phones still didn’t ring on Friday after the earth-shattering news that Greens Leader Bob Brown had resigned.

Was that nutty speech to his ‘Fellow Earthians’ in Hobart last month a sign that he was on his way out the door?

Was it a final mad explosion of pent-up hubris that had him calling for a one-world government, an ‘all-of-the-Earth representative democracy’?

It was certainly time to go, Brown told a press conference on Friday, flanked by his successor, Christine Milne, and his handsome, bearded partner Paul Thomas.

People had taken to stopping him in Hobart’s Salamanca Place to say, ‘Thank God for the Greens’.

With a desperate Labor minority government belatedly turning on its Greens partners, and the Greens vote going backwards in state elections, Brown, 67, had passed the zenith of his career.

Best to get out while the going is good, with his legacy intact and before anyone notices the decline of the party he has led as a senator of 16 years.

As usual, a woman is left to clean up after the party, formidable and not to be underestimated though Christine Milne is.

In her first comments at Brown’s farewell press conference, Milne, 58, made a pitch to rural and regional voters, claiming “the Greens and the bush” simply misunderstood each other.

‘I’m going out there as a country person to say to other country people it is time that the Greens and country people worked together.’

Good luck with that, considering greenies are the chief cause of grief to the bush.

Let us count the ways. Forestry towns destroyed by irrational green tree worship. Uncontrollable bushfires caused, not by global warming, but by green opposition to hazard reduction.

National parks left to feral animals that rampage though neighbouring farms. Dams never built thanks to greenie protests. Wind turbines plonked all over bucolic hillsides. A live cattle industry brought to its knees…

Read the entire article here: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/greens-country-girl-christine-milne-is-no-friend-of-the-bush/story-e6frfhqf-1226326602622

I’ve written many blog posts cranky with Mr Brown for being such a hypocrite and for so often telling made-up stories and trying to pass them off as ‘saving the environment’.   Remember my blog post of June 2009 ‘The Already Bankrupt Brown Green’ about the pristine forest that was once a thriving timber town known as Wielangata…

Read more here:  https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/2009/06/the-already-bankrupt-brown-green/

NASA Rebuked for Promoting AGW

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Many of my colleagues are saying there are lots of signs about that its already the beginning of the end of an era, in particular that it will soon no longer be popular to believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Breaking news today is the release of a letter signed by 50 former NASA employees asking the organisation desists from making embarrassing comments promoting AGW…

March 28, 2012

The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
[Read more…] about NASA Rebuked for Promoting AGW

Time to Rethink Basic Assumptions about the Murray and the Planned Water Reform

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TONIGHT the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Media Watch program put together a garbled defence of the consensus position on water reform and the Lower Murray, a position based on ‘junk science’.

The program omitted to declare that the federal government, the same government that funds Media Watch, has committed $10 billion for the implementation of the water reform plan.

My objections to the A$10 bilion plan are explained in part in my recent report ‘Plugging the Murray’s Mouth: The Interrupted Evolution of a Barrier Estuary’. Extracts from this report follow:

FOR thousands of years before the European settlement of Australia, when there was good snowmelt in the Australian Alps, the Murray River would tumble down from the mountains, then spread west over the vast black soils of the Riverina, wind its way south through the limestone gorges of the Riverland, before flooding into Lake Alexandrina. Lake Alexandrina is still a vast body of water covering an area of 570 square kilometres; so vast that looking back across the lake from Point Sturt, shorelines recede into the distance and it’s impossible to see Pomanda Point near where the river enters the lake.

While the lake is vast, its outlet to the sea is a narrow and shallow channel between the sand dunes of Encounter Bay – an outlet that sometimes closes over.

In April 1802 British explorer Matthew Flinders, while circumnavigating Australia, described the shoreline as low and sandy topped with hummocks of almost bare sand. There was no river mouth on his map. Historians have written that this acclaimed navigator and cartographer “missed” the Murray’s mouth. It is much more likely that the inlet had closed-over.

Twenty-eight years later, in February 1830, another famous British explorer, Charles Sturt, visited the region but from the inland, travelling-down the Murray in a whaleboat. Captain Sturt described the place where the river enters the lake, which is about 60 kilometres from the Southern Ocean, as the end of the river. He wrote in his journal that:

“We had, at length, arrived at the termination of the Murray. Immediately below me was a beautiful lake, which appeared to be a fitting reservoir for the noble stream that had led us to it; and which was now ruffled by the breeze that swept over it.”

On the third day, Captain Sturt attempted to manoeuvre his whaleboat from the lake to the Southern Ocean but was blocked by sandbars.

“Shoals again closed in upon us on every side. We dragged the boat over several, and at last got amongst quicksands.”

It was not until the fourth day that Sturt conceded that it would be impossible for his men to drag the whaleboat any further over the sand bars and sand flats. So, again in February 1830 the Murray’s sea mouth was closed-over.

When Captain Sturt’s diary was later published it included comment that:

“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 south westerly wind would pick up and the sea would pour in.

[Read more…] about Time to Rethink Basic Assumptions about the Murray and the Planned Water Reform

Climate4You Update: Ole Humlum

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Dear Jennifer.

Please find below a link which will take you directly to the monthly newsletter (ca. 1.8 MB) with meteorological information updated to February 2012:

http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_February_2012.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.

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

All the best,
Ole Humlum

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography
University of Oslo, Norway

Murray-Gate: Some Questions for Media Watch

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ABC News Watch is unsure of the motivation behind Media Watch’s inquiries regarding my research on the Murray River. Based on their understanding, none of the 11 members of the Media Watch team have the scientific qualifications, or necessary scientific experience, to comment or judge the science behind the policy debate about the Murray River.

ABC News Watch today put 15 questions to Media Watch about what it is calling Murray-Gate.

Questions are here: http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com.au/

They are good questions. But what’s the deadline? When will the questions be answered? I was expected to give immediate answers to Media Watch. I think Media Watch should have until 5pm tomorrow, Friday.

Read more here: http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com.au/

Salt Water, Crocodiles and the Lower Lakes: In Perspective

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JO NOVA has posted on the Murray and Media Watch with comment:

“She [Jennifer Marohasy] wants to restore the estuary to its estuarine (salty) form. The end of Australia’s biggest river (the Murray) has barrages across it, to stop the salt water entering. The farmers near the end now depend on the freshwater, just as the farmers in the middle of the long river depend on the highly variable water there too. This is a big policy dog-fight I’m not in on. But I suspect if someone were suggesting putting barrages across the Yarra, the Swan or the Brisbane, the Greens and the ABC would not be attacking people who opposed the barrages. There is no higher principle or policy sense at work here.”

Read more here:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/jennifer-marohasy-and-abcs-mediawatch-tribal-warfare/

Charles Bourbaki made comment in the thread:

“Australia is one of those rare countries where the twice daily tidal influx has no influence on our estuarine rivers. Saltwater crocodiles are never seen in them and people are safe swimming many miles inland. The scientists at Media Watch know this and are quite rightly asking questions.”

I’m so used to having to defend my position and explain that there would be tidal inflows without the barrages that I didn’t get the sarcasm and left comment suggesting I have absolutely no sense of humour.

Thanks Jo and Charles for helping to get some much-needed perspective back into this issue – at least for me.

And the following letter sent into the Victor Harbour Times (a newspaper read by Lake Alexandrina residents) last autumn provides a very local perspective:

Sky High Salinity & SA Water
Tuesday, 31 May 2011

Re the statements by SA [South Australia] Water spokesperson published last week in the Times.

He started absolutely spot on with “The barrages are designed to protect water quality in the River Murray & Lower Lakes by providing a physical barrier between the fresh water in the Lower lakes & the saline water in the Coorong.”

This is exactly what SA Water is failing to do. They are maintaining too low a level upstream of the barrages. Currently levels US Goolwa barrage are fluctuating on the tide (Tuesday 31st between .28 metre & .54m). When a high tide and southerly wind arrive, like the .77m of the 24th May we have massive entry of saltwater. This is not a minor “some salt water entry”. Neat salt water reached as far as midway between Point McLeay and Point Sturt. There is large loss of freshwater dependent aquatic life along with loss of water by irrigators who receive no warning. Hope everyones auto watering systems for stock & irrigation were off.

It is not all flushed out in the following days. A week later we have salinity from 2,8000 at Clayton to 2,000 at Goolwa. Currency Creek went to almost 10,000 at the peak and will probably take months to come back down with the regulator limiting the flow.

There should no longer be a large number of gates open, flows are now down to 24,00Ml/day from some 80.000 at the end of February this year.

Two thirds of the gates should be closed with a level maintained around .5 – .6m.

Lets hope when they do eventually close the gates they have fixed the barrages, to prevent the saltwater leakage experienced last year. Have any capital works been done? Perhaps it’s not too late for maybe rubber strips between the joints in the logs.

The barrages needs to be managed to do what they were built for so as to benefit the Lakes community rather minimise SA Water’s costs & manpower requirement.

Ideally the level should be raised as much as possible to maxmise the flow into Lake Albert, Currency Creek and other salty wetlands. When all full level should be lowered to a safe level depending on sea tides and wind forecast. This cycle is then repeated in order to get maximum freshwater exchange into these areas.

Thanks
George Bennett

PS Sunday evening looks a fair chance for another good dose of saltwater.

******
Thanks to CJ for finding the newspaper clipping for me… again.