Jennifer Marohasy

The biggest global warming conference since Kyoto, opened today in Montreal, Canada. The 10,000 experts from 180 nations are to spend the best part of the next 10 days deliberating about how best to “slow the alarming effects of greenhouses gases and global warming”. I had a look at ‘global temperature’ some weeks ago in [...]

Three fascinating papers were published in Science (Vol 310, 25th November 2005) last week on climate change and the relationship between carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide levels and temperature over the last 650,000 years. They report on new findings from the European Project for Ice Coring in the Antartica. A graph in the ‘perspectives [...]

A main premise of the following guest post from Boxer* is that across the West Australian wheatbelt, water tables are showing an upward trend. Boxer explains the problem and the need to act now if we are to learn from history and avoid the problems that destroyed, for example, agriculture in the valleys of the [...]

‘Getting in Deeper?’ was the title of a letter to the Courier Mail on Friday which read: Now that we are going to have to import more fish because of cutbacks to commercial fishing we can expect an increase in Indonesian illegal fishing in our waters to meet the extra demand for imports. So cynical! [...]

The MY Esperanza and the MY Arctic Sunrise, equipped with a helicopter, speed boats and hi-tech communications equipment, departed Cape Town harbor last Sunday afternoon for the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The boats are not part of some expedition by the South Africa navy, rather they are the property of Greenpeace. Greenpeace plans to stop [...]

Through an agreement with the building sector, the Australian Government has resolved to eliminate worst energy performance practices through a national standard approach to minimum performance requirements for buildings, see Greenhouse Office website. Based on this advice, the Australian Building Codes Board is set to consider the introduction of five-star energy regulations in all new [...]

The Head of space environment at the British National Space Agency told The Scotsman yesterday that the US Space Guard project will have identified almost all the most dangerous “Near Earth Objects” by 2008 and scientists had already demonstrated they were able to alter their course. Mr Tremayne-Smith said humans should avoid extinction as a [...]

Ian Mott, a contributor to this blog, has noted in a comment at an earlier post that: The Queensland Cabinet is currently considering “phasing out” private native forestry on freehold land. And for all the families that have not only protected forest but actively expanded it over the past 70 or more years, when the [...]

I thought it was cattle and cane that was driving the destruction of rainforests in the Brazilian Amazon, but according to an article in New Scientist titled Forests paying the price for biofuels by Fred Pearce, it is soybean grown for biofuels. Pearce writes that rising demand for biofuels is being driven by European Union [...]

I am no Sandra Sully, but I did try and read with expression on ABC radio national’s Ockham’s Razor on Sunday. Hosted by Robyn Williams I got the spot after complaining to Williams about Jared Diamond hogging a whole hour of ‘The Science Show’ some months ago. Anyway, in the speech – which you can [...]