Jennifer Marohasy

THERE is only one global accord that specifies curbs in greenhouse gas emissions, The Kyoto Protocol. It’s named after a town in Japan and it was the culmination of a process launched with the Rio Summit in 1992. The Kyoto Protocol was used to lambaste John Howard for not ratifying it when he was Australian [...]

“IT is too late to leave, you need to take shelter in your home and actively defend it.” That’s part of a government warning issued today to residents in the Shire of Augusta-Margaret River in south western Western Australia. Twenty homes have already been lost. Roger Underwood, Chairman of The Bushfire Inc, an organization devoted [...]

A leading environmental economist has called upon governments to either radically reform or abandon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In his report ‘What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for Radical Reform’ published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada) reviews the IPCC’s own procedures [...]

TWO years after Climategate – the scandal caused by the leaking of over one thousand emails detailing correspondence between leading climate scientists exposing conspiracy and collusion including how to stack review committees, exaggerate warming trends, and avoid the disclosure of sensitive information – another batch of emails have been leaked, again from the University of [...]

OLD style windmills dot the Australian rural landscape. They were once critical for pump watering from bores, creeks and dams to tanks to water sheep and cattle. Wind turbines are a variation on the old theme. There are apparently 3,421 wind turbines in the UK mostly build for electricity generation; two-thirds of these are owned [...]

Dear all. Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter (ca. 1.4 MB) with various meteorological information updated to October 2011: http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_October_2011.pdf All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius. Previous (since March 2009) issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/ Ole [...]

A new book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, by historian Bill Gammage explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people. According to the publisher’s website: “Early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy [...]

THE revelations that Paul Greenfield, vice chancellor at the University of Queensland, has been forced to retire early because of “irregularities” in admission of a close relative to medical school do not come as a shock to many of us who have worked in the Australian university sector for many years (‘Relatively stupid for vice-chancellor’, [...]

EARLIER this week the Australian Senate passed the Clean Energy Bill and the associated 18 other Bills that set out the carbon pricing mechanism due to come into effect from July 1, 2012. The so-called big polluters will need to reduce or offset their emissions from that date. One potential mechanism for offsetting emissions is [...]

Activist group GetUp! has just launched a campaign to save the Great Barrier Reef from the dredging of Gladstone Harbor. http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/coal-seam-gas/great-barrier-reef/dredging-the-reef/take_action “Millions of cubic metres of sea floor is being removed from the Great Barrier Reef right now. It’s the largest dredging project ever undertaken in Australia, making way for massive new coal seam gas [...]