Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

Water Plan will decimate Murrumbidgee frogs

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RICE growers along the Murrumbidgee River are likely to be among the hardest hit if the federal government proceeds with its new water sharing plan. If the region loses 45 per cent of its current allocation as proposed by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, an unintended consequence will be a dramatic decline in the populations of over a dozen species of frog. These frogs have benefited from water being pooled in upper catchment areas for rice production; if the plan goes ahead more water will end up going down to South Australia and over the barrages into the Southern Ocean, to the detriment of flood plain wildlife.

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New Murray Darling Basin Guide: All Politics?

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The Murray Darling Basin Authority released a ‘Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan’ yesterday which had been touted as an independent scientific report.   My impression of the document, however, is that it is an audacious grab for more water based on popular myths.  

Amongst the many unsubstantiated claims in the Guide, is mention of an 80 percent decline in the abundance of waterbirds across the Basin since 1983.   

I am a little familiar with numbers of water birds  in the Macquarie Marshes.  According to various public statements by expert Richard Kingsford numbers have also been in dramatic decline here, but his actual data, only available from 1985 through to 2001, indicates an increase.

Our Malicious ABC Science Show

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Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) currently dominates climate science to the extent that many consider it a fact – not a theory.   The famous philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would describe AGW as the current dominant paradigm because this is where the majority of professional scientists claim their allegiance. Of course there are dissenters, commonly referred to as sceptics or deniers, and Kuhn would have correctly predict that these individual would be excluded from the scientific community as evidenced in the Climategate emails.  

It is particularly evident from the Climategate emails that a group within the scientific community will go to great lengths to deny so-called sceptics the opportunity to publish in the peer-reviewed literature including through the removal of editors and stacking of review committees. 

Nevertheless, outspoken sceptic Bob Carter has managed, over his distinguished career to amass a long list of publications in the peer-reviewed literature including publications of direct relevance to climate science in the best international peer-reviewed science journals.

I make specific mention of Professor Carter and his publication record, because yesterday, on the ABC Science Show, it was repeatedly stated that Professor Carter has a very poor publication record.

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Save the Murray: Remove the Barrages

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The release of a new Murray Darling Basin plan on October 8, 2010, is likely to reignite debate over how best to solve the problems of the Murray River. It will further pit some environmentalists and some South Australians against upstream irrigators as a debate over how to fix the two very large freshwater lakes at the very bottom of the Murray River rages. Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert are situated behind the narrow expanse of water known as the Coorong, beyond the Coorong is the Southern Ocean and upstream of the lakes is the River proper. 

Few understand how different ecologically this region was before European settlement and the impacts of agriculture and the construction of barrages designed to keep salt water out. Oral histories from local families and the diaries of the first European explorers paint a different picture of the Lakes than that shaping the debate today. If we look back to what the river was like before the barrages then there is a much different solution than that currently being proposed. A solution that may not be as palatable to the South Australian Government or those communities who have grown used to life behind the barrages but a much cheaper and more environmentally sustainable solution in the longer term.  

Many academics and bureaucrats deny that the lakes were ever estuarine. But families that have lived in the region for generations explain, for example, that in 1915, before the barrages and during a period of prolonged drought, sea water penetrated beyond Lake Alexandrina up the River Murray as far as Mannum with the sightings of a shark at Tailem Bend and a dolphin at Murray Bridge.

Since 1941 and the completion of the barrages blocking 90 percent of flows between the lakes and the South Ocean a new history and geography of the Lower Lakes, Coorong and Murray mouth has been created…

Read more here at Quadrant Online.

At Least Listen to the Sceptics

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AN unfortunate characteristic of most of the public discussion on global warming is the name-calling peppered with false claim suggesting that there are very few so-called “sceptics”.   Last week Liberal Senator, Nick Minchin, was identified as not only a climate change sceptic but labelled a “denier” because of his stand against the emissions trading legislation which was being debated in the federal parliament. In fact, there are sceptics in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s own Cabinet but for the sake of politics they are keeping quiet, or gagged.  Read more here.

Learning Dust Lesson to Fight Wildfires

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untitledIT is generally agreed that the worst dust storms since European settlement were during the 1944-1945 period.  

In his book Out of the West: A Historical Perspective of the Western Division of NSW, former Western Lands Commissioner, Dick Condon, says there were 34 severe dust storms at Wagga Wagga during the period 1944-45, many so bad that it would have been necessary to turn the lights on in order to see inside the average sized house.  

Mr Condon suggests the dust storms during the 1982-83 drought were not as bad as those during the period 1885 to 1945 because of the much improved conditions of the landscape in the semi-arid and arid grazing country in western New South Wales.

In contrast, it is generally agreed that bushfires are getting worse.   [Read more…] about Learning Dust Lesson to Fight Wildfires