http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-14/heatwaves-bushfires-predicted-to-hammer-nsw/4009006

My name is Mr Koala Bear and I’ve been studying his report.

Naughty Tim has NOT told the whole story.

There are a lot of problems with relying on Parramatta for hot days for western Sydney. Parramatta is not a high quality site according to the Bureau of Meteorology, Parramatta only has temperature recordings from 1970 and Parramatta is jammed with more and more cars and especially air conditioners making it even hotter.

Luckily, I’ve found a high quality site west of Sydney with temperature recordings back to 1923. A much better site if we want to know about hot days and climate change.

I split my counts of hot days at Bathurst into 10-year intervals and counted the number of days in each decade above 35.0 °C.

Now I will tell the story of two Tims.

Tim 1 was busy playing his vinyl Beatles records back in the swinging ‘60s when he looked at his data and became very alarmed because it showed that the number of very hot days for each decade had fallen from over 60 to about 20 in just 4 decades! The trend was very bearish.

Tim 1 was convinced that a new ice age was setting in and by the end of the century everyone in Australia would be living in igloos! Imagine koalas living in igloos!

Nearly 50 years later, Tim 2, the Climate Commissioner, was listening to Lady GaGa on his iPod, when he saw that the number of very hot days over the past 4 decades was rising very steeply. Tim predicted that EVERY day would be over 35C by the end of the century. The trend was very bullish: very scary for a bear.

Both Tims just looked at the last five decades and were alarmed.

The real story is that the climate changes.

Be careful not to fall into the Tim-trap of just following a trend for a short period and thinking that this will go on forever. It just does not happen that way with our climate.

******

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Account Number 10376039

But scientist Basil Beamish noticed that in the Climate Commission report they only show the trend of the number of hot days from 1970-2011. There is data for Sydney, measured at Observatory Hill, back to 1890.

Dr Beamish noticed that if you use all of the hot days data back to 1890 it is clear there is a different long-term pattern in play (see blue line in chart). In fact the year with the greatest number of hot days for Sydney is 1926 (12 days) and this has not been beaten since.

But instead of reporting on the long term trend for Sydney as measured at Observatory Hill from 1890, Professor Flannery has chosen to just focus on Western Sydney and in particular use only the data for Parramatta North (see red line in chart). This data set begins in 1970, which was a low point in the hot days cycle. By choosing Parramatta and beginning in 1970, Professor Flannery can make the upward trend in hot days look dramatic.

Parramatta is further inland than the Observatory Hill site and so the summers are warmer and the winter’s colder. But if there were data for Parramatta back to 1890 it would almost certainly show the same pattern as Observatory Hill. Indeed it was almost certainly hotter in Parramatta, in Western Sydney, in 1926 than anytime since.

Once again the observational data does not support the nonsense claims made by Australia’s Climate Commissioner, Professor Flannery.

******
Basil Beamish provided the chart and many of the words. Thank you.

1. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-14/heatwaves-bushfires-predicted-to-hammer-nsw/4009006

For example, the number of tornados in the US is increasing.

But the increasing count is due to better weather tracking technology recording more low intensity events, according to Alan Cheetam.

The charts are from Alan Cheetham’s website. Its a trove of information and data that helps puts the dire warnings about tornados and much more in some perspective. It can be accessed here: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/
Tornado information here: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_4CE_Precipitation.htm

*********
Monday May 14th

After posting that those committed to global warming keep finding new things to scare us with, I wake up to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation claiming:

Heatwaves, bushfires predicted to hammer NSW
Updated May 14, 2012 08:18:14

The Climate Commission has released a report predicting record heatwaves, bushfires and rising sea levels in New South Wales because of climate change.

The report says the temperature in Sydney tops 35 degrees on just three days a year, but based on climate modelling, it will be 14 days per year by the end of the century.

Federal Climate Commissioner Professor Lesley Hughes says western Sydney is getting disproportionally hotter and drier than the rest of Sydney.

“If we compare western Sydney with the rest of Sydney, the number of hot days in western Sydney used to be three times as many as eastern Sydney, and now it’s four times,” she said.

“So what we are seeing is not only rising temperatures but some parts of the country are getting disproportionally hotter”…

The report, part of the Commission’s series titled “The Critical Decade”, predicts by century’s end that sea-levels will rise by 1.1 metres, putting more than 40,000 New South Wales homes and 250 kilometres of highway at risk.

Particularly vulnerable areas include Lake Macquarie and Wollongong.

Professor Hughes says there will also be more bushfires.

“The number of very high fire danger days could increase by over 20 per cent by 2020, by up to 70 per cent by 2070,” she said.

Chief climate commissioner Tim Flannery says some of the negative impacts of warmer weather in Sydney’s west are not immediately obvious.

“What happens when we get these very, very hot days is that elderly people and the very young particularly are vulnerable and people get a little bit confused because they’re heat stressed,” he said.

“People get angry as well, particularly if you’re sitting in a traffic jam and it’s stinking hot outside.”

Australians were lead to believe that this footage, that shocked the nation, was typical of what occurs inside many abattoirs in Indonesia: that the footage was real.

We were told the footage wasn’t taken by Four Corners or the ABC.  Lyn White from Animals Australia is the face of the campaign against live cattle export and she starred in the documentary. She was at pains to tell us it was easy enough to get the footage. So we were lead to believe she had taken it herself.

Of course professionals could have staged something like this. The footage could have been totally contrived. We could have been looking at a work of fiction: a setup, a horror film.

Interestingly there is an organisation that specialises in film production for environmental, conservation and animal protection groups. In the ‘Tracks Investigations, Annual Review 2011-12’ the UK-based directors, Gem and Ian, claim responsibility for the footage shown on ABC TV. They boast that their work was “aided” by the screening on “Australia’s main TV station ABC in May”. They also claim it was their most successful project in their 18 year history:

“Some 40,000 media stories followed, sparking massive public opposition to the live export trade and awakening the consciences of a nation to the plight of animals.”

What I’m curious to know is: if it was so easy to get the footage as claimed by Lyn White, why did Animals Australia contract Tracks Investigations to do the work? And if it was indeed Track Investigations, and not Lyn White, who were responsible for the shocking video clips, why wasn’t this declared in the ABC Four Corners program?

“Shortly before the Prince’s arrival, it was revealed that thousands of villagers had been evicted from the forest, their huts in the paddy fields torched and their coconut palms felled. This was carried out by the Tanzanian government’s Forestry and Beekeeping Division, with which WWF has been working. But Stephen Makiri, the head of WWF Tanzania, was quick to insist that WWF had never advocated expelling communities from the delta, and that the evictions were carried out by government agencies”.

Read more here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/9246853/How-climate-change-has-got-Worldwide-Fund-for-Nature-bamboozled.html

How climate change has got Worldwide Fund for Nature bamboozled
The Telegraph, May 5, 2012 by Christopher Booker

According to Pat Sword the contracts are illegal along with the European Unions attempts at enforcing them. Mr Sword is a chemical engineer with considerable technical experience in the design and implementation of renewable energy projects. But now he’s spear-heading a legal challenge that has just had the The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) rule in his favour, in particular that the manner in which the EU is implementing its renewable energy programme (20% renewable energy by 2020) is not in compliance with the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters.

Here is a Q&A Mr Sword did on the Convention after returning from a September 2011 Compliance Committee meeting in Geneva.

Mr Sword explains the situation today in the following letter:

Dear Jennifer

This has been a highly complex case of environmental law, for which the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee has issued its draft findings and recommendations today…

In a nutshell UNECE has ruled that the manner in which the EU is implementing its renewable energy programme (20% renewable energy by 2020) is not in compliance with the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, namely the citizen’s human and environmental rights, see introduction and three minute video clip: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/introduction.html .

Essentially the Convention defines the procedural rights of the citizen relating to the provision of information on the environment, the participation in the development of policies and individual planning decisions and finally the right to contest acts and omissions of the authorities in a legal system, which is fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive.

To repeat again, this case was complex. The EU ratified the Convention in 2005 and in order to do so brought in the necessary legal provision, namely Directives, which applied to the Member States and Regulations, which applied to its own Bodies and Institutions, Ireland was not only the single Member State, which has failed to ratify the Convention, but it failed also to comply with the necessary EU legislation implementing the Convention. While the UNECE Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee will investigate Communications from the public, they cannot do so in the case of Ireland, as it will not ratify the Convention, so a much more complex case had to be developed to bring the EU before the Compliance Committee. Furthermore, the Compliance Committee has only a limited amount of resources, so they will investigate only a limited number of test cases and will chose to investigate what aspects they consider important in improving general compliance with the goals of the Convention.

In this respect, they are not a regular legal court, so not all aspects in which EU and National law was breached will be addressed, only specific terms related to the Convention. In addition many of the issues were highly technical, which would be better understood by technical experts rather than a tribunal of legal experts with a limited timeframe.

However, this is a hugely important decision, which goes beyond the Irish situation to all the 27 Member States, the renewable energy programme as it currently stands is proceeding without ‘proper authority’, the public’s right to be informed and to participate in its development and implementation has been by-passed. The goal of UNECE is to achieve compliance with the Convention, a process will now be started to ensure that the recommendations are addressed, if ultimately they are not, then UNECE has the option of requiring the EU to withdraw from this UN Convention on Human and Environmental Rights.

Finally there is another ‘twist to this tale’, as the Convention is part of EU law, there is now a legal ruling that this law has not been complied with. There are long established legal procedures where if a Member State does not comply with EU law, the citizen can seek ‘damages made good’. http://ec.europa.eu/eu_law/infringements/infringements_dommages_en.htm
Electricity costs are soaring to implement these dysfunctional policies, which have by-passed proper and legally required technical, economic and environmental assessments. Not only is the landscape being scarred as thousands of wind farms are being installed, but people in the vicinity are suffering health impacts from low frequency noise, while birdlife and other wildlife is also adversely impacted. It is long overdue that a STOP was put to this type of illegal and dysfunctional policy development and project planning.

Regards

Pat Sword

**************

To spend billions of our money a ‘positive’ has to be proven

Wind and solar energy, when the weather is right, are effective for what is on the clothes line. This does not mean that Ryan air are going to buy gliders or sailing ships will deliver cargo into our ports. Yet we revel in the fact that billions are to be spent in ensuring that 37% of Ireland’s electricity is to be wind powered. Many engineers ‘spoil the party’ by pointing out that this technology is completely obsolete, is ineffective and can only be supported by massively inappropriate subsidies. Others argue that it is ‘free energy’ and our future wealth.

Pat Swords is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and a Chartered Environmentalist. He has not only designed high technology industry throughout Ireland and Europe, but over a decade on EU technical assistance projects helped implement EU environmental legislation into the new Member States. Pat, a specialist in environmental protection, will only tolerate expenditure on that which is cost effective and appropriate; Green and grandiose is out.

Pat’s point is clear, public opinion does not bestow Rights; only the law does. Pat and other similar professionals can demonstrate, that the approximately one thousand wind turbines installed to date in Ireland, have completely failed to deliver their claimed emissions and fuel savings. Furthermore, no additional savings will ensue; as we implement the Government and EU approved plan to increase the number of turbines to nearly four thousand, complete with a doubling of our high voltage grid by an extra 5,000 km.

However, to be clear Pat does not have to prove a ‘negative’. To implement such a plan, the Administration has to prove to us a ‘positive’. After all, even for a small project at home, one has to know how much does it cost and why are we doing it! So Pat started looking for the information, which should have been there by law. He is nearly three years later still looking, but now with the assistance of the United Nations Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee, who are well advanced on a compliance investigation (Communication ACCC/C/2010/54) against the EU.

To explain, while Irish law defers to that of the EU, the EU has also ratified International Treaties and Agreements. One such is the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. This is important, it is your Human and Environmental Rights, in particular your procedural rights to participate in the decision making around you. If one wants to implement a significant industrial policy or project, the public has to be provided with information related to costs / benefits / impacts and allowed to properly participate in both the policy development and individual planning decisions.

Ireland won’t ratify the Convention; its Administration does not believe in transparency or in providing its citizens with access to a legal system, which is fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive to contest acts and omissions of the authorities. So in Europe and Central Asia, we are essentially alone with Russia in this regard. However, the EU ratified the Convention in 2005, so it applies to Community legal order here in Ireland.

To clarify, with regard to public participation in decision-making, members of the public do not have a veto right, but the authorities must, to an objectively high standard, show that public comments have been seriously considered. Therefore they should be able to show why a particular comment was rejected on substantive grounds. Indeed in appropriate circumstances a member of the public, whose comments were not duly taken into account, should be able to challenge the final decision in a judicial proceeding. Elsewhere in Europe this is routine with a cost amounting to less than €5,000.

The Irish Administration has already been in and out of the European Court of Justice for a refusal to comply with the EU Directives implementing the Convention.

However, this is where things are getting interesting. The Treaty of Lisbon is clear, the Citizen has a Right to Good Administration and to have damages made good. Furthermore, the European Court of Justice has several decades of case law on citizen’s rights to damages where EU law was not adhered to.

Eirgrid engineers pointed out in 2004, the inefficiencies on the grid which would occur if the current level of wind energy, about one thousand turbines, was installed. They concluded a 15% increase in generation costs was not justified given other alternatives. They were ignored, so household electricity rates have gone from 15 cent per unit in 2006 to the current 20.5 cent per unit, while natural gas, which fuels 60% of our electricity, is still for industry consumers in the 2006 price range. If one installs lots of wind turbines from Denmark, where household rates are a whopping
29.5 cent per unit, then all these billions will have to be paid for.

Pat’s efforts in his private time are demonstrating that neither the Irish Administration nor the EU made the slightest effort to comply with the legally binding Convention.

Not only has no verification been made of emission savings to date, but the costs and emission savings associated with the now legally binding 40% renewable energy target are completely unknown.

Indeed, under the original 2001 EU Directive on renewable energy, the EU Commission was legally required by 2005, to assess the environmental degradation cost associated with the greenhouse gas emissions from conventional power stations and the price distortion effects associated with public support for renewable energy. They simply decided not to complete the report and instead came up with an even bigger programme for renewable energy. This is a plan based completely on political ideology, which has by-passed the legally binding procedures in relation to assessment and democratic accountability.

As Ireland won’t ratify the Convention, the Compliance Committee cannot accept a Communication in relation to alleged non-compliances by Ireland. So Pat had to document a case against the EU. As the Compliance Committee pointed out after their September meeting after hearing evidence from both parties; on approval of the Convention, the EU declared that it would be responsible “for the performance of those obligations resulting from the Convention which are covered by Community law
in force”. They therefore concluded in their follow up letter to the EU Commission
with:

“Could you please explain why the Commission says that it is not responsible for the actions of the Member State in this case?”

The Compliance Committee met four times a year. They propose to issue their draft findings and recommendations after their March meeting. As Pat states; “the evidence of non-compliance is overwhelming, while one will have to wait for the ruling; non-compliance with the Convention is a breach of EU law. The Compliance Committee has already ruled that the EU has to provide better access to the European Courts for citizens to challenge acts and omissions of EU institutions.
There is no reason why Irish citizens should be paying for renewable energy contracts, which were awarded without ‘proper authority’ or planning permissions, which were granted in a manner which was not legally compliant”.

Gradually the moon and the sun will fall out of step until their pulls are opposing resulting in neap tides.

The size of tides is not only affected by the direction of the gravitational pulls from the moon and the sun, but also their distance from the earth that changes because their orbits are elliptical. The astronomical phenomena while complex are predictable forming cycles that repeat with characteristics unique to each place on earth, tending to vary in predictable ways with topography and sea depth.

Controversial New Zealand-based weather forecaster Ken Ring has posted comment about the king tides associated with the full moon this Sunday:

“PERIGEE is the name astronomers give to the closest earth-moon distance for the month. On 6 May [2012] it is the May perigee. It will coincide with full moon. The moon will swing in 356,953 kms from earth, and will look extra-big and extra-bright as it rises at sunset. On the day of any full moon the moon rises above the horizon at the exact second that the sun disappears beyond the horizon, which in Auckland on 6 May will be 5.24pm.

“And not only does this month’s perigee coincide with full moon but this perigee will be the nearest to earth of any this year, as the distance of the moon’s close approach varies and the apparent size varies by up to 20%. The last closest was 20 March 2011 and the next time it will be as close will be January 2014. This month’s full moon is due to be about 17% brighter than average. In contrast, later this year on Nov. 29, the full moon will coincide with apogee, the moon’s furthest distance from earth, which will be relatively smaller and dimmer.

“There is always reason to be careful around all perigees, as they exaggerate whatever else is going on in weather. Closest perigees are even more reason to be vigilant. Last year’s closest perigee in March brought the Japanese tsunami earthquake and a 7-intensity earthquake in Christchurch. As usual, the normal sea tides around the world will be particularly high and low. This is because at perigee, the moon exerts over 40% more tidal force than during its next apogee two weeks later. King tides are primarily king tides in the land, and large earthquakes occur with double the frequency in the week of perigee.

“Closer perigees increase that seismic risk. Sea mammals have already started beaching in Peru which portends earthquake activity in that region. Perigees bring high winds because the extra gravitational pull on the atmosphere created by the moon’s proximity creates turbulence…

Read more here: http://www.predictweather.co.nz/ArticleShow.aspx?ID=398&type=home

There are already some indications this trend is stalling with no increase in average global atmospheric temperatures for 15 years [1].

For those who subscribe to any one of the many theories that purport to explain natural climate variability the stakes are not so high: whichever way temperatures swing we can claim to be right. Indeed simply claiming that climate change is natural does not constitute a theory amenable to falsification.

There has been some arguing recently over ocean temperatures, in particular heat content, and how it is trending. I am happy to concede the AGW proponents might have one remaining residual warming trend to cling to here.

I’ve been watching the charts of sea surface temperature that have dipped recently [2]. Nothing for the warmists to promote here.

But sea surface temperature is not the same as ocean heat content.

Across at Jo Nova’s blog there is a chart ‘Climate Models versus Argo Data, Global Ocean Temperature’ that shows no increase in ocean heat content. But the chart only goes back to 2003 [3].

A new paper by Sydney Levitus and co-workers entitled ‘World ocean heat content and thermostatic sea level change (0-2000), 1955-2010’ is causing some excitement amongst warmists [4]. Key conclusions are:

1. A strong positive linear trend in exists in world ocean heat content since 1955
2. One third of the observed warming occurs in the 700-2000 m layer of the ocean
3. The warming can only be explained by the increase in atmospheric GHGs

I can see the linear trend and I’m prepared to trust that one third of the warming has occurred in the 700-2000 m layer of the ocean. But the last claim: that the warming can only be explained by the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases. This is an extremely speculative claim.

Clearly Levitus et al. are convinced that carbon dioxide is a key driver of climate change, but aren’t there other more compelling theories.

********

[1] GWPF. April 2, 2012. No global warming for 15 years. http://thegwpf.org/the-observatory/5360-no-global-warming-for-15-years.html

[2] Climate4You Update March 2012 http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_March_2012.pdf

[3] David Evans. The skeptic’s case. http://joannenova.com.au/2012/01/dr-david-evans-the-skeptics-case/

[4] Levitus S. et al. In press. World ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level change (0-2000), 1955-2010. Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2012GL051106 http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL051106.shtml

Today he was judging at the inaugural Currency Creek Wine Show. Currency Creek empties directly into Lake Alexandrina. Mr White describes it as, “A small, but very pretty appellation on an estuarine river system flowing into the lakes at the mouth of the Murray.”

And I love his description of the Currency Creek region more generally:

“Cross that range and you’re in rain shadow country, where Currency Creek and its neighbouring stream, the Finniss, flow out of Mosquito Hill country, Cox’s Scrub and Ashbourne, toward the south-east. Into the Murray estuary.

Over that way the stones are more aggro and tortured, and vary from the heavily-mineralised metamorphic schists of Kanmantoo, where I grew up on the Bremer River, to the intensely-varied fruitcake of chaos some big glacier dumped where the Finniss escapes the hills. It’s highly picturesque, from the almost English pubbiness out Ashbourne way, with European trees (just outside the declared region), to the wild reaches of samphire and reeds between the old river ports of Milang and Goolwa.

The vineyards seem largely to have been planted on the alluvial sands and clays of the sedimentary flats, and some terra rosa over limestone, but some have been more adventurous. Dr. Berthold Salomon, the Austrian winemaker, planted upstream on a rocky fruitloaf of glacial moraine: the complexity of the many ancient geologies shaved up, transported and dumped by massive ice has given him a multi-epoch pudding of stones of myriad mineral flavours and water-retaining capacities. A moraine terrine terrane, if you like. In these ancient parts, these are my favourite geologies for viticulture. Gimme chaos; get complexity.

But I’ve been up and down that eastern side of the range with him, licking rocks, finding the ones with the flavours that best match home.”

Mr White is not only still excited by the topography and geology of this region that borders Lake Alexandrina to the southwest, but he is also fascinated by the notion of opening the barrages.

Just yesterday he wrote at his blog:

“While the debate about the Murray-Darling reaches anarchic crescendo, there is a persistent and increasingly laudible argument that the barrages be removed from the Murray Mouth.  These are a series of weirs which secure the freshwater coming downstream by holding the saltwater of the ocean out. It’s supposed to be like a dam, with the fresh river water flowing over the barrages and into the ocean.  Recently, it’s been the other way round, with seawater leaking back through to the dirty polluted puddle of droughtwater within.  Diluting it, if the truth be known…

“The history of our estuary has been a long string of unfortunate mistakes…

Now it has some reasonably fresh, if not exactly clean, water in it, the river system is being provided a short breathing space for these estuarine industries: down this end, dairying is also vital, but entirely dependent on a good supply of fresh river water.

The thing that scares me about all this is the ongoing popular presumption that the floods are somehow normal. These floods are not normal. Drought is normal. And ongoing.

I discussed this recently at Burra with the radical Natural Sequence Farming genius, Peter Andrews.

He pointed out that during the white exploration of its coastlines, Australia’s rivers were barely visible: there was no mighty Mississippi or Nile Delta emergent, and no surge like the hundreds of kilometers of freshwater that whoosh into the South Atlantic where the Amazon emerges from its jungle.

“The rivers here hardly ever made it to the sea,” Andrews said. “The water stayed in the country and kept it good. The rivers were explored from the interior. Somehow we’ve got to remember what it was like before us. We’ve got to learn to spread the water out, use it where it falls, take its energy and destructive force away, slow it down, and let it fill the country while cleaning and draining it in its own complex way. Slowly. If there’s any left to flow into the ocean, that’ll be good.”

And along these same lines I’ve written that if the current water reform process is truly about giving back to the environment, then we should be thinking back to a period before rivers and creeks became constricted by sheets of water running off compacted soils, before swamps were diverted, before river de-snagging and before the blasting of rock bars for paddle steamers.

As historian Bill Gammage notes in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia  back in the dreamtime shallow streams and overflows flushed more of Australia, filling billabongs, swamps and holes, and recharging springs and soaks.

That was a time when the health of a landscape was measured less by how much water was in a river, and more by how many kangaroos it could support.

In 1901 James Cotton, a Cobar pioneer, wrote that before the district was stocked with sheep and cattle it was covered with a heavy growth of natural grasses and that the ground was soft, spongy and very absorbent.

Overstocking was a problem throughout the Murray Darling Basin particularly during the late 1800s resulting in significant land and water degradation. Overstocking transformed soils in many districts from soft and spongy to hard clay that, instead of absorbing water, caused the rain to run off in sheets as fast as it fell – to again paraphrase Mr Cotton.

In the past one hundred years there has been a gradual improvement in land management. Stocking rates have fallen, some native grasses are returning and there has been a move to minimum tillage conservation farming practices. This has resulted in a general improvement in soil structure.

The ground may not be as soft, spongy and very absorbent as it once was, but there is no doubt that when the rain now falls on the Murray Darling, much less water runs off into adjacent rivers and streams than it did one hundred years ago. This must have implications for the amount of water flowing to South Australia.

Indeed a truly healthier Murray Darling Basin would mean less water for South Australia and as I’ve argued repeatedly, don’t waste what’s left on the dammed Lower Lakes; certainly not on the Lower Lakes during drought. Instead let’s open the barrages, or at least remove the Mundoo barrage, and let these coastal lagoons fill with some seawater as once happened naturally each autumn and for longer periods during drought.

Mr White is not frightened of the idea.  And if the salt water should on occasions extend beyond the Lakes and as far up the river proper as Jervois, where the off-takes for the irrigation pipeline begins, Mr White suggests that:

“They simply shoved a pipe into another place further upstream where the water was better, pumped her down and kept irrigating…”

Why not!

******

Read about Philip White and good wine at http://drinkster.blogspot.com.au

More specifically at

Tasting the End of the River
An anticipatory Mediation
Of A Brand New Wine Region
By Philip White

read about the Barrage Removalists, link here

http://drinkster.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/up-next-currency-creek-wine-show.html

And you can post a comment.

********

PS

Interestingly the blog post by Mr White links to ‘A fresh history of the lakes: Wellington to the Murray Mouth, 1800s to 1935’. This 2004 report certainly provides a lot of useful historical information about the Lower Lakes and how they were often fresh before the barrages. But the same report omits so much information to the extent that it denies Lake Alexandrina was once the central basin of a wave-dominated barrier estuary. If you are interested in a longer history consider my report ‘Plugging the Murray’s Mouth: The Interrupted Evolution of a Barrier Estuary’ that is available for download here:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Plugging-the-Murray-Rivers-Mouth-120212.pdf

And there is also my recent submission to the Murray Darling Basin Authority here:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/MDBA_Submission_Marohasy_Abbot_April16_2012.pdf (sorry this is 10Mb)

But many people appear to have a problem with understanding theory and considering it in the context of reality. Consider Anna Rose and her performance on the documentary ‘I Can Change Your Mind About Climate Change’ featured on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) this evening. Ms Rose was flown across Australia and around the world to talk with climate change sceptics but refused to engage constructively on issues of scientific evidence. Yet evidence is central to science and in particular determining whether theory and reality match.

Instead of listening to what Richard Linzen had to say about feedback mechanism and global climate she said he was not credible because of his views on passive smoking. When it came to Marc Morano, another person introduced to her as sceptical of anthropogenic global warming, Anna Rose point blank refused to talk with him because she said he was a liar. Clearly Mr Morano is influential, here was an opportunity for Anna Rose to apparently show him up as a liar, and she would not engage.

Nick Minchin, who travelled with Ms Rose and who had been specifically tasked with attempting to change Anna Rose’s mind, also tried with the evidence, but he didn’t see able to engage her either.

Jo Nova, David Evans, Richard Lindzen and Marc Morano all provided data that would suggest the theory as promoted by Anna Rose does not accord with reality, but she would not engage.

I noted she suggested that there was something wrong with the sea temperature chart provided by Mr Evans, so why didn’t she provide an explanation and show us what the situation really is with respect to sea temperature?

Instead Ms Rose suggested that all credible scientists say we have a problem, that increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are going to result in the destruction of our economy and the Great Barrier Reef, and we must believe them. Does she realize she is just appealing to authority and not engaging with the evidence?

It would have been easy enough for the documentary makers to nail a couple of issue of evidence. For example, what is the real story with global sea temperatures? But instead, by the end of the documentary it appeared they were keen to move from the science to issue of renewable energy and so was Anna Rose.

Tony Jones suggested, when he opened the Q&A session that immediately followed the documentary on our ABC, that he wanted to focus on renewable energy issues and that the science was no longer a central issue, but every time a sceptic began with some scientific facts, Mr Jones called on “his scientist” Matthew England who was ‘wired-up’ in the audience to put a particular perspective with respect to the science; the ABC perspective.

And according to Jo Nova:

“We did 4 hours of footage at our house, and they showed not one single point I made, not one answer to Anna Rose’s questions. I repeated my favourite lines about 28 million weather balloons, 3000 ocean buoys off by heart at least 4 times [which show no global warming and therefore a mismatch between reality and theory]. Obviously everything I said was too ‘dangerous’. But we have the full tape of the whole event, so sooner or later the world will see the parts that the ABC deemed to be not ‘interesting’ to the Australian public. So all in all, pretty much as we expected. They trimmed it down to the point where it’s tame, they gave the alarmists the last word (they always do)…”

Our ABC has no concept of evidence, or the importance of attempting to match theory with reality, as part of assessing the reliability of a scientific theory.

And it is disappointing that our ABC couldn’t bring itself to get even one sceptical scientist into the Q&A audience to provide some support for Nick Minchin – though he did well enough on his own.