Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

What to Listen to, And Read, This Week

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Here is a clever video about what is wrong with government’s latest planning scheme for the Murray Darling Basin.

Interestingly Topher has quoted extensively from my 2003 monograph ‘Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’.

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This blog is about community, and access to information. Information that is not politically correct or even fashionable… But hopefully well considered.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  3. Hasbeen says

    How does that thing go about imitation & flattery?

    You should be flattered Jen.

    Still, great to see the information out there in another place for some to find. Unfortunately the topic is a long way from the ken of most Oz city dwellers.

  5. Debbie says

    I agree with Hasbeen that you should feel flattered Jen.
    That 2003 piece should be quoted far and wide.
    We’re all very tired of the half truths and disingenious statements made about the “health” of the rivers.
    As you found and as Topher highlights, a lot of the commonly accepted statements are completely unfounded.
    Good for you and good for him!

  7. Luke says

    Vintage stuff el Gordo – a classic bit of Carteresque rhetoric. I hope Motty also does a piece.

    I enjoyed this bit of bullshit “Do you understand that the correct null hypothesis is that gentle warmings, such as that which occurred between 1979 and 1998, and equivalent coolings, are to be viewed as due to natural causes unless and until evidence indicates otherwise.”

    Now we’re into “gentle” warmings as we frolic in the park gamboling among the flowers (who have flowered earlier again).

    But anyway why bust a foofer valve – just elect the mad monk and he’ll repeal all those nasty carbon legislation thingys. Simple as that.

    BTW Hasbeen is back. Excellent. I thought he’d karked it like Wessy woo. But suspect Wes is a sock puppet – no interminably boring essays?

  8. Neville says

    Luke as you know and all here know what Australia does about carbon taxing won’t change the climate in the slightest, ever.
    It doesn’t matter whether we have Abbott or Juliar at the helm, but of course it also doesn’t matter what the developed world does about carbon taxing either because we can’t reduce emissions fast enough to keep pace with the developing worlds increases.

    The developed world has been flatlining for years,you should know these facts, but in case you can’t find them here they are.

    http://rainforests.mongabay.com/09-carbon_emissions.htm

  9. wes george says

    That’s right, Luke, let’s regressively tax the whole bloody economy and redistribute the cash to Labor’s and Green’s mates. That’ll save the planet from them stinkin’ flowers blooming early again.

    I think I have discovered a Luke Doppelganger cowering in basement in Washington DC armed with a pump shotgun and a petrol generator (oh, the hypocrisy) awaiting the Climatic End Times.

    (In Washington the flowers are blooming very, very late this year due to AGW induced colding.)

    A must-read-to-believe:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022503176_2.html

    But try not to laugh out of respect for the mentally afflicted. Climate Change Derangement Syndrome is a clinically recognized form of depression. Apparently, the entire Green Party of Australia is certifiable.

    http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/articles/2009/02/09/climate_change_takes_a_mental_toll/

    Too bad Luke never ponied up for private health insurance. He could use some good psychiatric help to manage his fierce moral urgency to stop flowers from blooming, early or late.

  11. Bruce J says

    Luke,

    Perth’s weather is just like it used to be back in the ’50’s and ’60’s when I was at school and before air con became a must have. Can’t remember how many times we were sent home when the temperature hit 105F, so we could cook at home (or play under the sprinkler) while the teachers went off to the beach for the arvo!

    Oh, not all the records have been broken yet – the one for 12 days straight over 100F still stands, and they don’t say how many days it has still been 100F at midnight, so I guess that one still stands too.

  12. el gordo says

    Around 5000 years ago the earth began a slow downward spiral into another glaciation, but at the moment there is no tipping point in sight.

  13. el gordo says

    Looking for a lead, in tracking down the roots of global warming hysteria, it has become patently clear that it began in the mid-1970s.

    The weather had been bad and there was pressure on world food supplies and a lot of lose talk about a return to an ice age. Nigel Calder comes to mind as an advocate of the theory, which was readily taken-up by the msm.

    There was a flurry of activity in the scientific world, but most importantly the social and natural scientists jumped onto the bandwagon, looking at the political, social and economic consequences of global cooling.

    The World Food Conference of 1974 raised a concern flag, so the scientific journals like Nature and Science gave it a run, backed-up by New Scientist. From there the MSM sold it to the masses.

    After the great climate shift of 1976 the unholy alliance between scientists, journalists and politicians went over to global warming. It was easier than dismantling the gravy train and very lucrative for those involved.

  14. wes george says

    Oh, my GAUUUD, Luke!

    The bloody flowers are blooming earlier and later than usual (depending on where you are) and now Perth is have a HOT SUMMER!!! Holy Thermometer, Robin!

    In fact, it’s the third hottest summer since the end of the Jurassic Park era, which was a cool movie btw…

    Well, that’s what I call unequivocal evidence for Climate.

    Houston, we have a climate!

  15. wes george says

    This concise article by Prof. Walter Russell Mead explains why the provincial Green/Labor coalition are in cartoon-land when it comes to the regressive tax and redistribute approach to the climate con.

    From the American POV there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell for a global agreement on climate fraud. The gig is up. The con is over. Congress voted to stop funding of the IPCC. But here in the Lucky Country it’s as if we’re some 19th century colony awaiting last years news via the next Royal Navy supply convoy.

    Perhaps we taxpayers oughta fund a little fact-finding junket to Washington for Lady Gillard the Dishonest just so she can catch up with the latest in imperial trends and gossip.

    http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/11/28/dead-green-treaty-stinks-up-the-room/

  16. Luke says

    All utterly irrelevant to the atmosphere Wes. The physics cares little for our political constructs. We are like ants.

    In fact anyone who now thinks that AGW is not happening is well – stupid or some redneck rightist idiot.

    Anyway Wes you might enjoy my latest video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL0PbJRc-CI I’m branching out into art

  18. wes george says

    We are like ants?

    If an alien intelligence were to enter Earth’s orbit today and begin to observe the planet below, studying the atmosphere, the oceans, the whales and the continents with their deserts, forest and farm lands. It would certainly notice our cities, ports, mines, dams, highways and airports.

    I wonder if an alien intelligence would think of our cities, our hydrocarbon-based economy and even our nuclear power plants as “unnatural.” Or would it look upon human terraforming much as we do the termite mounds we might encounter during a bush walk.

    We are like ants, in that we are part and parcel of the planet that spawned us and the nature that we create – not only our momental works of engineering, but within the quiet spaces of our virtual worlds – our imaginations – it’s all utterly as natural as the evolution of bird beaks in an isolated island ecology.

    How could it be otherwise? We aren’t supernatural.

    The definition of nature we inherited from our Enlightenment philosophers is inadequate. Darwin and more recently Lovelock have forever changed that.

    Luke, it doesn’t even matter if AGW is happening, it’s an undeniably natural evolutionary process occurring within the chaotic nonlinear system we might call the human cultural technological complex. And the rate of human cultural evolution is accelerating exponentially, so calculations of sustainability based on today’s state of development is meaningless by tomorrow morning. We have always lived in a world where innovation arrives just in time, that’s how invention works.

    It’s all part of a planetary evolutionary process that might well have happened a million times over in the 15 billion year history of the universe. It’s nature unfolding as it should.

    Climate is change! Adapt.

  20. el gordo says

    And the other good news comes from Tietsche et al. (2011) which states ‘anomalous loss of Arctic sea ice during a single summer is reversible, as the ice–albedo feedback is alleviated by large-scale recovery mechanisms. Hence, hysteretic threshold behavior (or a “tipping point”) is unlikely to occur during the decline of Arctic summer sea-ice cover in the 21st century.’