Jennifer Marohasy

LATE last week, the Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence released its second report**, which was tabled in parliament by Minister for Climate Change, Kate Jones. The Centre receives substantial funding through the state-funded Office of Climate Change, headed by Premier Anna Bligh’s husband, Greg Withers. It is an open secret that re-election of a [...]

ACCORDING to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, a scientific theory, for example, Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is likely to be based on a particular set of experimental and theoretical techniques for matching it with what is observed in the physical world.  The hard core of AGW theory is embodied in the law and mathematical expression described by [...]

VOLCANIC eruptions have long been known to influence global climate, besides their obvious local effects. They emit large clouds of aerosols and sulphur-containing gases into the lower and upper atmospheres, affecting albedo, cloud formation and causing optical phenomena. They also cause widespread oceanic disturbance (tsunamis) which can destroy settlements large distances from the eruption.  Although there is [...]

I saw this one man from Adelaide University at Milang and I asked him about these barrages and he said that if they let the sea in the caravan park would have been flooded. He mentioned something about the Surveyor General’s Office telling the Premier that hundreds of acres of land would be inundated if [...]

KARL Popper and Thomas Kuhn, two great philosophers of science, agree that scientific progress involve the critical overthrow of theories and their replacement by alternative ones.  For Popper the replacement occurs following the falsification of universal statements while for Kuhn change is necessarily revolutionary, involving more than a change in the claims made and questions [...]

By frankly acknowledging mistakes  and encouraging her colleagues to treat skeptics with respect, Judith Curry hopes to bring about a meeting of the minds.  Read more here.

On Thursday the New South Wales Government officially declared the nine-year drought ended.  The very next day the CSIRO released a report warning that the ‘current drought’ appears to be at least partly linked to ‘climate change’.  The CSIRO report entitled ‘Climate variability and change in south-eastern Australia’ is an initiative of the South Eastern [...]

Backstage at the ABC Television studios on Monday night, after the Q&A program where I appeared as a panellist, the compere, Tony Jones, complained to Tim Flannery that he didn’t adequately refute my answers to the climate change questions.    Of course, Tony could always invite me onto his Lateline program where he could ‘grill’ me himself.   For [...]

Former News Limited Editor, Bruce Gutherie, will be a panellist on ABC TV’s Q&A on Monday evening.   In his new book ‘Man Bites Murdoch’ Mr Gutherie alleges a problem within the culture of News Ltd..  There is a problem not only within News Ltd but more generally within the mainstream media in Australia; too many journalists [...]

I wrote these two laws down on a scrap of paper years ago. I still have the scrap of paper but not the original reference. Harris’s First Law: Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science. Harris’s Second Law: The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional [...]