Jennifer Marohasy

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Special Drought Statement from BoM

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For large parts of southern and eastern Australia, dry conditions have now persisted since October
1996, a total of eleven years. For some areas, the accumulated total rainfall deficit over this period
now exceeds a full year’s normal rain.

For the agriculturally important Murray-Darling Basin, however, October 2007 marks the sixth
anniversary of lower than average rainfall totals, with the November 2001 to October 2007 period
being its equal driest such six-year period on record.

This extreme dry period for the Murray-Darling Basin has also been accompanied by high
temperatures, exacerbating the low rainfall. Both daytime maximum and daily mean temperatures
for the six years from November 2001 to October 2007 have surpassed the previous records by a
considerable margin.

Read the 6 page pdf:

SPECIAL CLIMATE STATEMENT 14

Six years of widespread drought in southern and eastern Australia
November 2001–October 2007

Issued 1st November 2007
National Climate Centre

How Much Warming from Fireworks? A Question from Trevor Devine

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Dear Jennifer,

I have been wondering what thoughts you may have on the NSW state governments stance on global warming and their seemingly contradictory actions of tying 2 or 3 million dollars of fireworks to the Sydney Harbour Bridge each New Year and Australia Day and letting it rip oblivious on at least these two days of their claimed effects on global warming.

Kind Regards,
Trevor Devine
Councillor
Hawkesbury City Council.

Northern Leaf-tailed Geckos

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NLTG.jpg

Driving to Cape Tribulation two nights ago, I was hit with the unmistakable stench of what the Guugu Yimithirr indigenous people (just up the coast) call yumu; a scummy residue of coral spawning in the shallows of the coral sea. On this same night, I located two Northern Leaf-tailed Geckos on the sides of nearby trees, at the same height off the ground and on the same side, most proximal to the direction of the onshore winds. I wondered if these two events were related.

It took me eight years of almost nightly searching to find my first Northern Leaf-tailed Gecko Saltuarius cornutus. Endemic to the rainforests of the Wet Tropics and almost invisible in their marbled discretion, they are Australia’s largest gecko.

The attached image shows the difference between the original tail (left) and the regenerated tail (middle). The camouflaged, lidless eye (right) shows a slit pupil which allows much more light when fully dilated and the very reflective tapetum requires that the gecko face downward to avoid detection from owls. In the event of an attack, the tail and hind legs and the inverted position increase the likelihood that the kill-shot will be directed at the strategically deceptive ‘recoverable’ end.

In relation to sea-borne scum, I was impressed by the size of a vast rubbish dump floating in the Pacific Ocean, which covers an area bigger than Australia, as reported in ABC News.

2007 Nobel Peace Prize Winner No. 2498 – John Christy

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There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

The above are extracts from The Wall Street Journal article ‘My Nobel Moment’