Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Oceans Not Warming as Predicted

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The NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) has updated its Ocean Heat Content (OHC) data (0-700Meters) for the first quarter of 2011.

The oceans are not warming as the experts predicted.

This is another good reason for governments across the Western world to start reassess the advice they have been receiving on climate change and to start seeking out the opinions of the many meteorologist, climatologists, paleoclimatologists and hydrologists who are sceptical of anthropogenic global warming.

Via Anthony Watts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/08/the-new-giss-divergence-problem-ocean-heat-content/#more-39512

A Note from the Daintree

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Hello Jennifer,

Tourism in the Daintree Rainforest is continuing to decline, partly because of the relative value of the Australian dollar.

Recent upturns in the global economy have been met with a proportionate recovery in other parts of Australia, but the far north seems to have suffered the double whammy of natural disasters which have been overly-publicised to the extent that many travellers to Australia are still shying away from Queensland.

The challenge for the people of the Daintree Rainforest is to get the word out that we are enjoying unobstructed accessibility, are open for business and waiting to showcase the rich diversity of experiences that make a great nature-based holiday in the oldest rainforest in the world.

If you feel inclined to assist, kindly forward this eNewsletter onto a friend who may be considering travelling in the not too distant future…
[Read more…] about A Note from the Daintree

At Today’s Rally

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A few well known Queensland sceptics of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ attended the ‘No Carbon Tax’ rally today in Brisbane…  and there is also a frequent contributor to this  blog in this photograph. 

There were perhaps 400 at the rally. 

I suggested government needed to look around for better advice on climate change reminding the crowd that Tim Flannery once said that our dams would never fill again.  

Of course when the drought broke the dams filled to overflowing with Wivenhoe flooding Brisbane.   At that time government should have reassessed the quality of the advice it was getting on climate change, but instead and incredibly the Prime Minister Julia Gillard promoted Professor Flannery…  at a time when he should really have been sacked.

No Wiser After Decades of Climate Modelling

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“AN outcome from the anthropogenic global warming alarmism has been the implementation of government policies that can only reduce community resilience to the natural hazards of climate. The enormous research expenditure directed toward computer modelling and potential impacts has been at the expense of better understanding of the climate system and improved early warning of known hazardous events. None of the expenditure on climate change research over the past three decades has improved our ability to better understand and predict the onset and duration of drought, of tropical cyclones, conditions conducive to fire, or the extent of flooding. Yet each of these has been experienced across parts of Australia over the past 12 months, with significant loss of life, enormous private and public infrastructure destruction, and diminution of productivity.

“Proposed Government actions to make energy more expensive, or raise barriers that deny community access to existing energy forms, will further reduce community resilience to the hazards of climate. Today’s broad-acre farming is an outcome of mechanised production and transport based on fossil fuels; rural infrastructure is implemented and maintained with equipment driven by fossil fuels. From an economist’s perspective, rural industries are a diminishing percentage of GDP and of declining importance to national welfare. This jaundiced view fails to understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we self-actualise (ie, expand the national GDP) only after satisfying our basic wants of food and shelter. A community that neglects what underpins the resilience of basic food production and infrastructure becomes more vulnerable to climate variability and extremes…    an extract from ‘Community resilience and the hazards of climate’, by William Kininmonth

Read more here:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11986&page=0

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.