Gone Fishing
Posted by jennifer, August 5th, 2012 - under News.
Tags: Murray River
I am going to take some time out from this blog to try and complete a couple of projects that I’ve started, but am having trouble finishing. So there may be no new posts here for a while.
In the meantime you can subscribe for my irregular email updates here:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/subscribe/
And check the ‘Community Home’ page for updates from other readers with their nature photographs and more here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/category/community/
And here’s a picture I took of a fisher, a darter cormorant, in Kakadu National Park a few years ago. 
Interestingly according to one account of life in the Lower Murray in South Australia one hundred years ago there was a bounty on cormorants (that are closely related to darters), with 34,000 taken in one year ostensibly because they ate too many fish [1].
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[1] Travels in Australasia, by Wandandian see page 301
26th July 1909 at Caurnamont, near Mannum
‘Birds were very scarce, though we saw one fine old spoonbill wading round the swamp and swinging his head from side to side in the peculiar fashion these birds have while feeding.
On the latter day, while out shooting, I picked up a freshly decapitated turtle of the kind called by the natives “emys,” and on meeting a fisherman enquired of him whether he had caught many, and why it was without a head.
He replied that the turtles were so destructive of fish spawn, that a scalp fee of one penny was paid on the head of each by the Government, and that he caught a good many from time to time.
On further enquiry, I found that in the past year the South Australian Government had paid over £600 in scalping fees to various people for 116,000 turtles and 34,000 cormorants, thus satisfactorily explaining why the cormorants are so shy, and look upon every man with suspicion; for when one contemplates what a hunting they must have in the course of the year to furnish such an enormous “bag,” it would be decidedly strange if they were at all otherwise. In spite of all this I saw hundreds of them on the Murray and lake waters, so that I am sure many must pour in from outside to take the place of those that are shot, and should this be the case it will be many years before their numbers are at all reduced, or the Government get anything like the full value for their money, or even justify its expenditure.’
[Back then Murray cod were plentiful despite the turtles and the cormorant though now there are no Murray cod in that stretch of river below Lock 1.]
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3,962 Responses to “Gone Fishing”
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Interesting article from Jo Nova on well documented extreme heatwaves in OZ in much earlier years.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/extreme-heat-in-1896-panic-stricken-people-fled-the-outback-on-special-trains-as-hundreds-die/#comments
Many towns shown during that period.
Bob Tisdale looks at the SST in the area covering the path of Sandy over the last 70 years.
It hasn’t warmed over that entire period.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/05/an-inconvenient-truth-sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-along-sandys-track-havent-warmed-in-70-years/#comment-1137128
Rather buggers up the arguments from all the barking mad brigade. But will they admit their error and apologise? Of course not.
Once again a total fraud and con trick.
That is incredible; yet we have had England and the rest of the liars in the Climate Commission claiming Sandy was made worse because of much warmer SSTs:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/sandy-worsened-by-climate-change-report/story-fn3dxiwe-1226509537406
No lie or exaggeration is too much for the alarmists.
That is a good post at Jonova’s site.
Despite the current agenda, history is not bunk.
Here’s a little guessing game all can play.
HOW LONG do you think it will take for the warmists to find some “required” correction for those old sea surface temperature records, in the area traveled by Sandy, & many other US hurricanes?
Can’t have this same embarrassment of the warmists, next time they want to blame a natural phenomena on global warming, now can we?
I’ll give it 5 months, & then done very quietly.
“I’ll give it 5 months, & then done very quietly.”
Less, now that the Sun-king has won.
“I’ll give it 5 months, & then done very quietly.”
Seeing as the warmists are, like a large portion of Obama supporters, on govt gravy and accutely aware that it is always better to receive than to give, they couldn’t do anything else.
But ain’t it amazin’ how the receivers always get the breaks just when you thought it was safe to hope?
“But ain’t it amazin’ how the receivers always get the breaks just when you thought it was safe to hope?”
Yep; there is a God, and he hates humanity.
I just love the double standards of the left:
http://twitchy.com/2012/11/07/with-first-post-racial-president-reelected-fk-white-people-trends/
SD
“But ain’t it amazin’ how the receivers always get the breaks just when you thought it was safe to hope?”
Now that the scales are tilted to the side of the receivers, I can’t see an easy way back.
How do you suppose a conservative, and I use the term very loosely here in OZ can get elected when as Romney rightly commented,
my interpretation, 47% of the population are living at the expense of the other 35% the missing 18% are the public “servants” who merely recycle government ie. our money. They pay no effective tax as such, they might as well be paid their wages less tax and do away with the formalities of filling in a tax return.
It they promise not to change the status quo, and when elected, turn around and cut back on government largesse, they’ll be turfed out next time. If they promise to keep it all then what’s the point holding an election?
I despair because I’m still young enough be hurt.
Tiresome lot, hey.
“just when you thought it was safe to hope” but now it’s time to gloat!
Obama is a middle down bottom up man, so he got back safely.
“we have had England and the rest of the liars in the Climate Commission claiming Sandy was made worse because of much warmer SSTs” somebody gave you permission to use “liars” coh?
Warmer sst’s do give rise to hurricanes, unless I’m wrong about atmospheric vortex physics, see the following
“Hurricane sea cooling is almost entirely due to heat removal from above and not to cold water from below”.
http://vortexengine.ca/Isabel/Michaud_AS18_Presentation_R7.pdf
background, typical M T Montgomery
http://met.nps.edu/~mtmontgo/papers/nolanmontgo02.pdf
“AIR–SEA EXCHANGE IN HURRICANES” The 2000-05 experiment
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-88-3-357
Hurricane Sandy achieved wind speed of 175 km/h. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 achieved wind speed of 260 km/h. More disturbing is the finding by the Hurricane lab people of NOAA that the 1635 hurricane, guessed to be as low as 930 mbar, was able to produce a 20 foot storm surge. Think about that, and about the 1821 hurricane, cat 4 with a surge of 13 feet – right in Manhattan!
Instead of voting for a stable climate which has never existed, or hoping to manipulate climate through the tax system or putting more money into the hands of GIM and Goldman Sachs, it might be a good idea for large and wealthy cities near sea level to invest in very high levels of preparedness. Remember also that in a real emergency all kinds of big picture stuff goes wrong. Think local but act local. You’re a rich town, NY.
I’m not saying that King Charles I wasn’t flirting dangerously with Catholicism, or that there weren’t all kinds of witches running around New England in 1635. Nor am I denying that sin was causing SSTs to rise back in the mid 17th Century. I’m just saying that, when confronted with a 20 foot storm surge, you’re better off having a practical plan.
Gaia was a bitch in 1635, and she’s still a bitch.
Geezz Gav you’re hopeless. So what caused the three hurricanes more powerful than Sandy in 1 year from 1954 to 1955?
Here’s the Bolter’s column this morning on the Sandy idiocy. All those pesky facts are there so Gav won’t enjoy it much, but it is entirely accurate.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_a_storm_of_hypocrisy/
Worse than tiresome, gav. Especially when you gloat so foolishly. When you can’t even see that you need the givers to pick up your broken pieces and start putting them back together.
How long, d’you reckon, can you leave the bull in the china shop? It is very tiresome trying to make serious repairs when it is still on the premises.
Robert, pity Hansen didn’t learn about “the storms of my grandfathers.”
Seems like the IPCC’s solution for their next report is to lie even more. The De Boer idiot also thinks our present state of climate is like a smoker doing something after he finds he has terminal cancer.
What a mob of barking mad drongos and loons.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/climate-change/former-un-official-says-climate-report-will-shock-nations-into-action-20121106-28w5c.html#ixzz2BV4aTj5R
Just read A Bolt’s column in the paper.
We are not of the same political mindset, he and I, but he comes to the same conclusion about the givers and takers and how a politician can deal with it.
Not an easy task, given the numbers.
I don’t read Bolt Nev and it seems JDUB won’t have him for a polly minder either.
Did anyone squiz those hurricane studies?
Clever dicks can check out this series of modern day storms associated with real climate science
http://www.livescience.com/11260-hurricanes-nature-biggest-storms.html
Gav, just to balance your “Bloomberg” mentality and give you a chance to see clearly, here are both sides of the “Sandy” argument:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/07/job-candidate-tells-bloomberg-to-take-this-job-and-over-global-warming-cover/#more-73900
Yes, gav, you hipster, it’s true there are no sat photos of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, so I guess it doesn’t have the Now Generation edge of Hurricane Elena. But if boring, olden day storms ever start to draw the interest of the swingin’ set, you can read all about the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history on many sites like these:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/galveston.htm
https://ceprofs.civil.tamu.edu/llowery/personal/songs/hurricane/thestorm/1900strm.htm#path
By using that ultra-modern and lightning-fast google thingy I’m sure you can find lots more info. Some say Galveston was “unprecedented”! How about that! I know you like unprecedented stuff, gav. (I dare say Galveston had pre-European precedents – but why spoil a good climate scare with boring old precedents? They’re such a downer.)
Thanks for those links, Robert. You don’t mean to tell us that back in red-neck times there might have been many more bad storms simply because we didn’t have the tech to detect them?
Wash yo’ mouf out!
But I can remember even a decade BAGW [before AGW] when no sooner had you tried to prevent one lot of homes from being washed out to sea than another cyclone was on your doorstep.
And so-on, up to six times a “summer”.
Could this be because AGW, as Lindzen has predicted, has improved our weather and reduced our storms enormously or does the AGW cycle only come around every 60 years or so?
Robert, your problem is that you, Kinninmonth and Carter are all tarred with the same brush:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/cometh-the-storm-cometh-the-climate-lies-20121107-28ytj.html
The AGE must have had a relapse to allow this article. Maybe they feel a lot more reassured, magnanimous and inclined to “balance” when “f##k white people” have been vindicated:
“The wilful misuse of science by lobby groups to support their agendas has now become an epidemic. The view that more frequent or extreme climate events are occurring, as advanced by many commentators, directly contradicts the considered advice of scores of climate experts, including all those who wrote the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).”
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/cometh-the-storm-cometh-the-climate-lies-20121107-28ytj.html#ixzz2BafizeV1
Let’s hope that communities take disaster preparation in hand, rather than depending on charismatic politicians, agencies, bureaus, ministries, czars etc. When you ask a huge corporation or government body about its plans, it can always overwhelm you with abstract nouns to describe its virtues. Just don’t ask it for silly details like:
Have you made placements of bottled water?
Have you arranged to block subways?
Have you plenty of generator power?
Behind all the self-importance and pseudo-efficiency are guys like Bush, Obama, Clinton and Bloomberg. Would you trust them to water your pot plant or feed your goldfish over the weekend?
Rudi Giuliani might remember the bottled water and generators…but he doesn’t hang with Jay-Z or Bruce Springsteen. Who’d elect him?
It costs the Poms 20 billion quid a year but it considers itself private and should not answer on AGW policy decided by the faceless 28.
It is being challenged by one poor bloke and his wife:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/bbc_is_private_go_away/
Thanks to Bishop Hill
Very slowly and painfully the truth is extracted:
http://johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/huffington-post-and-their-lies-about-john-osullivan/
What an ordeal!
Kininmouth and Carter….
‘That formal government advisory bodies such as the Climate Commission are supported in their flagrant disregard for scientific principles and facts by senior CSIRO and university research managers is cause for severe national concern.
‘A Climate Commission that had the safety and welfare of Australians at its heart would be advising Parliament to expend resources on community infrastructure that mitigates the hazards associated with climate extremes. It would resile from opportunistic attempts to link human tragedies such as Sandy with speculative anthropogenic global warming.’
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/cometh-the-storm-cometh-the-climate-lies-20121107-28ytj.html#ixzz2BcSbGvHD
Its a travesty they can’t find the heat, so the walk back on CO2 has begun.
http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/science/environment/less-impact-of-co2-may-explain-slowing-warming-1.1418959#.UJt8ZI58d5i
That Carter and Kininmonth article is interesting because it shows where bazza disappeared to; his comments:
•
Like the frog when you put it in boiling water it will jump out but if you warm him up slowly he won’t know the difference. That’s where the world is at present. The last 10 years has seen some really extreme weather events that I have not seen in my 55 years. But the deniers will keep on banging on as if its not happening……heads in the sand.
Commenter Bazza Location Date and time November 08, 2012, 11:53AM
•
The Chair of the Climate Commission’s Science Advisory Panel Professor Matthew England states, “The evidence suggests that climate change exacerbated the severity of Hurricane Sandy.”
“The shifts in climate towards higher temperatures and more moisture in the air are becoming the “new normal” which is influencing the nature and intensity of weather patterns around the world.”
“Storm surges had a particularly devastating impact on areas of the USA coast. A warmer world is a world with higher sea levels that make storm surges much worse.”
Professor Steffen said that “The experience in the USA demonstrates that often our infrastructure is simply not equipped to deal with an overheated climate and more intense extreme weather events”
I think he knows what he is talking about.
Commenter Bazza Location Date and time November 08, 2012, 12:13PM
What a bunch of bs! “I think he knows what he is talking about.” You’re a goose bazza.
Whichever bazza it is, he’s missed a lot of Australian weather action if he’s only fifty-five. He got to witness Yasi, a real brute, only last year, and some recent terrors like George and Ingrid.
He would be old enough to remember the FIVE Category 4 and 5 Australian cyclones during the violent 70s (the decade it’s rude to mention, the one that gave the world Typhoon Tip).
He would have missed Innisfail 1918, a Cat 5 which spared just twelve houses in a sizable town. He would also have missed Cyclone Mahina in 1899. Mind you, that monster is one Cat 5 you’d be glad to miss.
Some said Mahina was, er, unprecedented. It was certainly worse than they thought!
Anyway, it’s time to put my head back in the sand.
Consensus? The facts behind the mythical 97%:
http://www.fcpp.org/blog/climate-scientists-consensus-based-on-a-myth/
Hey, several posts without watts or bolt!
Thinking debate may be improving, I followed several and read same old anti AGW commentary with the usual rhetoric then moved on to that William Kininmonth and Bob Carter letter. It’s full of asumptions too considering they don’t have much data prior to NASA. Not one item from published climate literature to support your latest posts.
Rob; is your sand in a bucket at home, down on the beach, or outback in the desert? You need a container to keep it stable these days.
Gav, I forgot to add that many people think the Mahina in 1899 is our most lethal natural disaster, with a bit over 410 dead. In fact, the deadliest natural event was probably the Vic heatwave of 1939. The five million acre fires of Black Friday, among the worst in world history, killed 71, but the heat of that summer killed more, with an accepted toll of 438. Some temps in Melbourne exceeded 45C.
Amazingly, gav, Black Friday was WITH precedent! Because Australia’s rural population was sparse in 1851, only twelve died on Black Thursday, 6 February 1851, but one quarter of Vic just burnt up – five million HECTARES and a million sheep! A temp reading in Melbourne, unofficial of course, was 47.2C.
And all that before climate change!
Robert; although I respect your posts and comments in general but “all that before climate change” is both in the industrial era and part of another scenario, broard acre landscape change. Also Melbourne was a “funny” place to live considering the seasons. Those hot summer north winds brought hay fever and bad bushfires on a fairly regular basis.
You may not recall my many posts on the theme, wild fire runs in dry crops at the speed of the wind and dry grass is the wick to the bush, all based on my own observations as a keen smoke watcher. Recently young Prof Brian Cox in one of his shows gave a fig around 3M/sec for wild fire on the run in typical agricultural country anywhere affected by drought.
Now; being really smug Rob, I must remind you that our SD constantly says such high city temps are only UHI.
What’s a ‘keen smoke watcher’?
Is that the same as a pyromaniac?
Our SD says no such thing Gavin.
You are definitely the one who ‘denied’ UHI and then renamed it ‘enhanced AGW’.
Nowhere has anyone claimed that high city temps are ‘ONLY UHI’.
That is complete nonsense!
Sorry….bit harsh….but that habit of accusing people of saying something they didn’t say is starting to become entirely tedious.
Deb; smoke watching became second nature while team working to reduce toxic emissions in cities and around industry on the fringe.
Bushfire control goes hand in hand with with the other hazard management routines including those involving arson and lightening strikes around our infrastructure.
It’s about observations and reading between the lines when pressed by devious minds.
“It’s about observations and reading between the lines when pressed by devious minds.”
Interesting description gav.
Observing that during a heatwave, when you possibly have a city temperature that is cooler than the smoke-filled, fire-ravaged, surrounding countryside, it disproves UHI.
VEERRY dubious evidence, that.
How about those other thousands of days when this doesn’t happen?
Yep SD,
I suspect it might have something to do with WHAT (bold) you are attempting to prove.
I agree that bush fire management is very important Gavin.
Have you seen some of the bi polar, centralised rules that prevent sensible hazard risk?
Have you seen some of the incredibly stupid and mindless ignorance that sees people jamming up their escape routes and allowing thick stands of eucalypts to grow right up to their back doors?
Attempting to point the finger at grass/crop fires and then ignoring the bleeding obvious around urban and semi urban infrastructure is not good hazard management. It is asking for trouble. Big trouble.
Simple things like fire breaks, clear access and backburning of undergrowth can do plenty to mitigate those risks.
The only real cost is political capital.
SD. during those heat waves, it was bloody hot everywhere around Melbourne. I could be monitoring smoke and temperature around industry on the western side, around Dandenong on the east, in the city and out in the hills where we lived under Mt Dandenong.
Yes, I usually carried a selection of thermometers in my box of tricks and was constantly referring to ambient around various infrastructure, labs, hospitals, breweries, paper mills and chemical plants. However an important indicator of seasons in the making was the plight of asthmatics, poor sods who might be suffering well before the fire season.
These fires greatly affected me, 1962, 65, 68 Dandenongs and more, 1967 Hobart, and the 69 Lara fire that I saw start in the You Yangs as a tiny smoke spiral one bright sunny day in Altona, it killed 17 on the Melbourne-Geelong highway not long after in similar circumstances to the many fatalities down roadsides in flat country south of Hobart.
Grass and blackberries also fueled the more recent Canberra fires that I witnessed.
http://mhj.sagepub.com/content/10/1-2/75
The El Nino which caused those extraordinary weather events in Sydney in the early 1790s is actually known as the Great El Niño of 1789–93. It didn’t just kill birds mid-air and dry the Tank Stream. It seems to have had global consequences. From Science Daily, who haven’t quite abolished history yet:
“Then, the so-called East India drought hit in 1790-1796. This one appears to have been felt worldwide, spreading civil unrest and socioeconomic turmoil. For instance, in Mexico, water levels at Lake Pátzcuaro fell so much they gave rise to ownership disputes over the land that emerged. In Europe, drought led to crop failures that preceded the French Revolution. Famines hit India.”
Of course, the worst was still to come for Asia in 1876-1878, with maybe 30 million dying from monsoon failures. Just as well they didn’t have to deal with climate change!
Grass and blackberries?
Gavin, I read with interest the various blogs and so on, plus mainstream media etc. And the one common thread, disregarding for a moment the detail of the science, is the overwhelming tendency to paint historical weather extremes as somehow separate or even irrelevant, whilst arguing that present day examples present evidence for anthropogenic climate change.
While I wouldn’t disagree that we most likely do have some effect on ‘climate’, there is a very worrying tendency to paint a wholly innacurate picture of what climate really is. Surely even you can see that?
Hurricane Sandy is an example. Exactly what evidence is there that Sandy was particularly influenced by climate change, when there is ample evidence that it was not in any way unusual? We cannot even be sure that it is the largest hurricane in the past 500 years. The primary reason it has any sort of profile is of course that it struck New York.
Can you confidently state that no hurricane in the past 500 years was not as large? What about hurricanes pre radar and satellite era that did not come ashore?
I think it is quite possible to draw conclusions about what AGW may mean in terms of weather extremes, but the problem is that it is clear that extreme weather events have always happened. And thus it is easy to assign some weight to the effects of AGW in an extreme event notwithstanding that in fact that event is not unusual in the longer term history of extremes. In other words, the extreme variability of weather can provide the confirmatory evidence whether or not there was any effect.
The prediction in terms of hurricanes as I understand it is for fewer hurricanes but greater intensity. Thus, a powerful hurricane (which it actually was not) after a longish period of no hurricanes making landfall could be seen as evidence of AGW. And yet the event in itself is not extraordinary.
So, how do you honestly claim Sandy to present any kind of evidence one way or the other? And what do you say to the mischievousness of suggesting that it IS evidence for AGW?
Yep, Graeme, Sandy was big, but as big as Typhoon Tip in area? I really don’t know. Of course, Tip was stupendously intense as well. (Thank you once again, 1970s!)
What Sandy has proven conclusively is a) an Atlantic hurricane in 2012 can have a large area, and b) in a true emergency, you are better off having a Giuliani than an alarmist turkey like Bloomberg running your city.
GM, I don’t make many if any claims about one event being evidence for this or that. I have just nominated a string of bushfires in different places and over decades that can still cause me to ponder about our relationship with the natural world.
Further back I gave links to modern hurricane studies that involved a string of large storms off shore mostly but I can only relate to them via NASA images, not MSM. I will say though, what we call hurricanes here are an aberration in world wide weather. Also fire storms that I have seen are an aberration in our bushfire fire behavior and you should know I seek vantage points to watch their progress, even those made as part of routine forestry operations.
My posts in general are about finding the norm, not the max or min as trends are far more important to forecasters. How often do I need to use the word ambient in regard to atmospheric measurements such as temperature, humidity, due point, frost and so on to confirm an entrenched methodology? Light and sound, Ph, stream flow even gravity all have to be treated in the same way before tackling such questions as radio traffic density and efective signal to noise ratios.
Instrument design grows with the need.
…’the overwhelming tendency to paint historical weather extremes as somehow separate or even irrelevant, whilst arguing that present day examples present evidence for anthropogenic climate change.’
The propaganda has been sophisticated and unrelenting.
Indeed Gavin, but I guess I am highlighting the question of whether the concept of a ‘norm’ is really the right one? In terms of policy I can see why we need to have some sense of a norm and what trends are evident.
But weather is inherently chaotic and trying to determine a trend from even a series of events is unlikely to offer a great deal of insight. My concern is that we see a concerted effort in the media to paint the proper norm as one of benificence – that is, weather should normally be quite benign and unusual or extreme events are out of the ordinary. And yet with weather, the ordinary must by definition include the extremes. Ordinary in this sense is NOT ‘sameness’.
Once you recast the popular notion of climate to represent a state without extremes, it is easy indeed to suggest extremes prove change.
You argue the case for trends, but can we make reasonable assumptions about trends with only very short term data at our disposal? Proxies may very well offer us some insight and I have to confess to ignorance in this respect, but I would be surprised if proxies offer us anything like the accuracy of an instrumental record. Otherwise we could just stop developing instruments tomorrow.
Can we really infer something useful from a detailed instrumental record of a very short period when the very nature of weather and climate is to embrace the extremes, the outliers?
All of that said, my personal beef as I say is the misrepresetantion of events to the public. And Sandy is a prime example of the art. So I repeat my question to you. Is it reasonable to use Sandy as an example of the dangers of climate change as our very own climate commissioner suggested just a week ago? Your opinion on that?
Ponder on our relationship with the natural world?
This paper is essentially a rehash of the consensual thinking on greenhouse effect:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n10/full/ngeo1580.html
Sorry, by rehash I mean rethink, IOW the team is wrong and there is no greenhouse effect.
Graeme M,
“Is it reasonable to use Sandy as an example of the dangers of climate change as our very own climate commissioner suggested just a week ago? Your opinion on that?”
Good question Graeme.
I have no problem with proven scientific research pointing to some warming, cooling, no change, climatic whatever but I am a bit apprehensive when they ignore the very same past climatic experience.
Good luck with gav’s reply!