Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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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.

How Serious Are the Ngarrindjeri About Connectivity?

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According to David Nason writing in last Friday’s The Australian, the traditional owners of the Lower Lakes, the Ngarrindjeri, want more water flowing through their country from up-river to maintain connectivity and keep the Murray’s mouth as the “Meeting of the Waters”.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/aboriginal-australia/title-fight-looms-on-murray-water-flow/story-e6frgd9f-1226035619633?from=public_rss

But no mention is made of the tens of thousands of megalitres which have been flowing out the Murray’s Mouth every day since it started to rain – since the drought broke.

There is also no mention of the barrages and how they inhibit hydrological connectivity and prevent inflows from the Southern Ocean.

Indeed if the Ngarrindjeri were serious about connectivity then they would be campaigning against the barrages.

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The photograph shows me (in yellow life jacket) with fisherman Alastair Wood in front of the Murray’s Mouth on about March 15, 2011.

The article by David Nason in The Australian was entitled ‘Title fight looms on Murray water flow’.

Lake Eyre, Still Flooding

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For the last three autumns, Lake Eyre in central Australia has received runoff from good flooding rains.

These photographs were taken by Rhyl as she flew from Quilpie to Birdsville to Lake Eyre in July 2010.

And the flood waters are arriving again this year.

Wild flowers as a mass of yellow from the air.

A land of patterns, according to Rhyl.

Click on each image for a better view.

Australian Government Only Gets Flawed Advice on Climate

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ON November 10 last year the Australian government’s Multi-party Climate Change Committee (MCCC) received a scientific briefing before it entered the policy-setting mode that it remains in today.

The briefing was provided by the only scientist on the Committee, Professor Will Steffen. A copy of the slide presentation that Steffen used has recently come into the public domain.

Quadrant Online has today posted an analysis by four independent scientists and an economist of Professor Steffen’s presentation, http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2011/04/government-misadvised .

The analysis demonstrates that Steffen provided the MCCC with only alarmist, inaccurate IPCC advice; no attempt was made to familiarize committee members with the reasons that many independent scientists all around the world view the IPCC as a deeply flawed organisation, whose advice on climate change is almost valueless.

This analysis of Steffen’s advice of last November is the latest in a series of papers critical of IPCC science which go back to 2009. The Australian government and its advisory scientists have failed to respond to any of these critiques, apparently hoping that if they ignore criticism it will go away. Given mainstream media attitudes, this ploy has regrettably proved to be very effective.

Australian citizens – who will be paying the costs of the intended new carbon dioxide tax – should demand that the press and government alike listen to independent scientific assessments of the global warming issue, and undertake critical analyses of the unsatisfactory scientific advice that has been provided by Professor Steffen and the IPCC.

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Other due diligence reports & related commentaries on Australian Government advice on climate change can be found here: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2011/04/due-diligence-reports

No Carbon Tax Rally – Brisbane May 7

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How will history record our current obsession with carbon dioxide and the idea of taxing it? What have you done about it?

I will be at the Brisbane rally against the carbon tax on May 7, See you there…
Queensland Parliament House Cnr of Alice Street and George Street
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Saturday, May 7 from 11:30am to 2:30pm

And if you were speaking at the rally…
What would you say?

Climate Refugees?

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UN Embarrassed By Forecast On Climate Refugees Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones. –Axel Bojanowski, Spiegel Online, 18 April 2011 http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,757713,00.html

Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said — for 2020. –Axel Bojanowski, Spiegel Online, 18 April 2011 http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,757713,00.html

The United Nations Environment Programme has tried to erase one of its glaring failed predictions about climate refugees by removing a map from its website purporting to show where 50 million climate refugees will come from by 2010. –Gavin Atkins, Asian Correspondent, 16 April 2011 http://asiancorrespondent.com/52560/cover-up-un-tries-to-erase-failed-climate-refugee-prediction/

Via CCNet – 19 April 2011 and The Climate Policy Network (more information here http://www.thegwpf.org )

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