Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Ray the Moderator

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THIS blog now has a moderator. In time we might even have some rules.

Ray grew up on a farm along the Tweed River in New South Wales. He started, but never completed, a degree in earth and biological sciences at the University of New England, Armidale. He’s had a few jobs over the years, including in the computer industry. Ray currently manages a residential complex on the Gold Coast which he describes as like being semi-retired. Ray the Moderator

Ray enjoys watersports including dragon boating, kayaking, snorkeling and plain swimming. He is married to a wonderful woman and has two grandchildren.

He would like to see this blog develop comment threads where respectful discussions of issues concerning Earth’s environment and human politics can occur. Ray doesn’t like Twitter because it encourages instant responses rather than thoughtful ones.

Here’s to more thoughtful comments.

Welcome Ray the Moderator.

Palmer Gored: A Win for Mandated Carbon “Markets”

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A new alliance between Al Gore and Clive Palmer is likely to result in the repeal of the carbon tax, but the big winner is probably the global warming industry, not the ordinary Australian. Indeed if you think your electricity bill is about to plummet, you’ve been mislead. gore and palmer

Much of the increase in the price of electricity over recent years can be attributed to the mandatory Renewable Energy Target (RET): a government legislated requirement on electricity retailers to source a specific proportion of total electricity sales from renewable energy sources including wind and solar, with the extraordinary costs paid by all electricity users.  

Al Gore appears to have convinced Clive Palmer, to support the repeal of the carbon tax on condition that the RET is consolidated. Earlier today Dennis Jensen spoke in the Australian parliament about some of the lucrative deals that Gore has done over the years:

Indeed Dr Jensen’s speech provides some historical context, while Jo Nova explains what the conditions Palmer has placed on repeal of the carbon tax will mean longer term for Australia:

It seems now that Palmer’s amendments to repealing the carbon tax do not include an Emissions Trading Scheme …  but keeping the $10b Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a win for Gore, and so is keeping the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and the Climate Change Authority — it’s another government funded advertising unit for the carbon scare campaign. The more patrons who are dependent on the carbon-subsidies, the more pro-carbon lobbyists there are. And they lobby like their livelihood depends on it — because they have nothing if the government policies don’t prop up their pretend free market.

As Ross Garnaut, a long-time proponent of climate alarmism and phony markets, commented today:

We’re in a better position than when we were facing abolition of carbon pricing, major tampering with the Renewable Energy Target, abolition of the Climate Change Authority, abolition of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

It may not be the ideal way of doing things, but Mr Palmer’s support for keeping existing arrangements will have important effects.

Solar Cycle Could Point to Mega-Drought

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THROUGH the Millennium drought of 2001 to 2009, I was optimistic that it would rain again, that the drought would end and probably with flooding rains.

The drought did break, and the aggregated average annual rainfall for the Murray Darling Basin as calculated by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) shows 2010 was the wettest year on record. The last time it was nearly as wet was 1956 and before that 1950.

The BOM only provides an official average annual rainfall for the Murray Darling back to 1900, but if we consider individual locations, like Bourke, the previous really wet year is 1890. That year the township of Bourke flooded, with historic photographs showing men in boats rowing down the main street.

There are exactly 60 years between 1890, 1950 and 2010.

While believers in anthropogenic global warming claim the climate is on a new trajectory with continuous warming, there is an alternative scientific literature that recognises these 60-year cycles. For example, Nicola Scafetta’s 2010 paper ‘Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications’ in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (volume 72, pages 951-970).

Bendigo-based long-range weather forecaster, Kevin Long, uses such patterns for his forecasts, and is very pessimistic about rainfall in the Murray Darling.

Mr Long is predicting that from 2016 there will be a rapid return to the cooler and drier climate of the early 1800s.

Remember Charles Sturt discovered the Darling River near Bourke in 1828 as a series of stagnant, saline ponds.

Mr Long is forecasting that this drier climate may last for the duration of the solar minimum cycle or approximately 30 years. The Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715 and the Dalton Minimum of 1790 to 1830 are the last examples of recurring solar hibernation periods.

Theoretically the Murray Darling should be in a much better position to deal with prolonged drought, given the water infrastructure built over the 20th century and recent water reform mandating the buy back of many irrigation licenses.

But in reality water reform has done nothing to reduce the dependence of the Lower Lakes on the upstream reservoirs and this creates an unsustainable burden on the entire system, particularly during drought.

Furthermore, there should be more awareness and concern about the relatively low flow at Lock 1 – indeed diminishing flow for the same quantity of rainfall since the 1980s. This is probably a consequence of improved land management throughout the Basin meaning water soaking into the soils rather than running off, as well as more trees, and salt interceptions schemes evaporating more water.

Daily flow data for Lock 1 is available back to 1967, and it shows that while rainfall might be cyclical, flow volume has been in general decline over recent decades. Historic low volumes were recorded at Lock 1 during the Millennium drought. Even with the record rainfall in the Murray Darling during 2010, flow at Lock 1 never reached the heights it did during the early 1990 and was a long way short of the peaks during the early 1970s.

flow data

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The text of this article was first published as one of my regular fortnightly columns in The Land newspaper on May 29, 2014. Data used to construct the chart shown in this blog post was sourced from the Murray Darling Basin Authority. Click on the chart for a better view, that begins in 1967.

March Against Democracy

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JULIA Gillard promised, if she was elected, that there would be no carbon tax. Tony Abbot promised, if he was elected, that he would scrap the carbon tax. But the learned ignorant promote mass action to get their way, all the while claiming tolerance, and respect for democracy. march rally

Many of the posters on display at the ‘March in March’ rallies today, in which tens of thousand gathered in Australia cities to boo capitalists and lament the lack of action on climate change, clearly showed the prejudices of the increasingly vocal, Australian inner city pseudo-intellectual.

As Carl Jung wrote in about 1957, “People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest slogans.”

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Link to original photograph of poster with ‘step aside or be deposed’ from the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tens-of-thousands-gather-for-march-in-march-protest-20140316-34v1x.html

Nick Cater’s book, entitled ‘The Lucky Culture: The Rise of an Australian Ruling Class’, gives great insight into the totems and prejudices of these self-labelled ‘progressives’.

Myth and the Bureau of Meteorology

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WE know that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology can’t forecast weather more than a few days out. So why should we believe a climate forecast to 2030?

According to Sara Phillips, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Bureau’s new State of the Climate 2014 report is a reliable source of information because it distils hundreds of experiments into three consistent reports.BOM

In fact there are few if any experiments that have been distilled in the writing of the reports. Rather Bureau staff have ran some computer simulations designed to produce a particular output, and combined this with homogenised and adjusted historical records again designed to produce a particular result. Conclusions include:

1. Australia’s climate has warmed by 0.9°C since 1910, and the frequency of extreme weather has changed, with more extreme heat and fewer cool extremes.

2. Global mean temperature has risen by 0.85°C from 1880 to 2012.

When I wrote to the Bureau in January asking why the national average is only calculated back to 1910, I received a reply explaining that data prior to 1910 “is often fragmented and of uncertain or low quality”. If this were the case, it begs the question how a global mean temperature can be calculated back to 1880?

This is one of seven questions I’ve put to Greg Hunt, Minister for the Environment, in a letter dated 4th March 2014. Minister Hunt is ultimately responsible for the operations of the Bureau and I’m of the opinion their operations deserve close scrutiny.

There is this myth that the Bureau is comprised of hard working scientists providing, like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, information without bias or agenda. More likely the Bureau, like the mainstream climate science community more generally, has become somewhat compromised.

Of particular concern to me, is the Bureau’s decision of last June, to discard the statistical models that had been used to generate seasonal rainfall forecasts in favour of a general circulation model that has no predictive skill at all. I have documented the absence of skill in the general circulation model in a peer-reviewed paper recently published in the journal Atmospheric Research (Volume 138, Pages 166-178).

I conclude my letter to Minster Hunt with comment that:

If the temperature record for Australia can be extended back to 1860, providing an additional 50 years of data, then this should be a priority. This information is more important than the calculation of a national average temperature. If data is to be adjusted and homogenized then the methodology applied needs to be clearly stated. Indeed having access to all the available records as far back as possible is important because it helps unravel the true features of the natural climate cycle, a goal that meteorologists and astronomers were working towards well before the establishment of the Bureau in 1908.

In arriving at theories that explain the natural world, the best scientists always use all the available data, not just the data that happens to fit a particular viewpoint. Furthermore, long historical data series are critical for statistical methods of rainfall forecasts, including the application of artificial neural networks that can currently provide more skillful forecasts than POAMA, the general circulation model currently used by the Bureau to produce the official forecasts. That the Bureau persists with POAMA, while failing to disclose to the Australian public the absence of any measurable skill in its monthly and seasonal forecasts, should be of grave concern to the Australian parliament.

My letter to the Minister can be read in its entirety here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/questions-for-the-australian-bureau-of-meteorology/

Not a Natural Disaster, Just another Rainfall Deficit

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In announcing yesterday’s $320 million drought assistance package for farmers there was some mention of the situation out west being akin to a natural disaster. A more accurate description would be that its part of a natural cycle – not a natural disaster.

There are many reasons why landholders may be particularly vulnerable to this drought, but they mostly relate to government initiatives that have over the last couple of decades significantly eroded the resilience of farming communities, rather than exceptional climate.

We live in a land of highly variable rainfall that has historically experienced regular drought often broken with big floods.

The Bureau of Meteorology has been defining the drought as a rainfall deficient for a 16-month period (October 2012-January 2014) relative to a long-term average defined as the years 1961-1990. So according to the Bureau there has been a severe rainfall deficiencies (lowest 10% to 5% of records) in place across much of inland Queensland, central northern New South Wales and in a small area on the coast of Western Australia near Shark Bay. Also, most of Queensland west of the ranges, northern New South Wales, northeastern South Australia and the southeastern Northern Territory has received less than 65% of the long-term (1961–1990) average rainfall for the 16-month period.

While I am sympathetic to farmers struggling to make ends meet, and I don’t begrudge anyone some government support when the chips are really down, to suggest there is a natural disaster because rainfall is less than 65% of what it was during the period 1961-1990 for a period of a bit over a year is absurd. Australian rainfall

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