Jennifer Marohasy

Coal not candles should be the symbol of Earth Hour. It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power [...]

ELEANOR HALL: Australian delegates to an international conference on global sustainability delivered a warning today that the earth is reaching a point where it’s changing beyond our control.

  Almost 3,000 scientists have been in London for the conference to discuss the relatively new field of earth system science. That’s how the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) [...]

Peter Lang sent a complaint to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) about last night’s 7:30 Report on solar power.  Here is a slightly reworded versions with hyperlinks added: “The ABC 7:30 report has improved greatly since Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann took over from Kerry O’Brien.  However, there have been lapses.  Last night’s 7:30 report on [...]

NEW Queensland Premier, Campbell Newman, orders ex-Queensland Premier’s husband, Greg Withers, to kill green schemes. That’s according to an article in today’s The Australian: “The showpiece of the Gillard government’s $1.5 billion Solar Flagships Program is now in jeopardy, after Mr Newman yesterday pulled the plug on $75 million in state funding pledged for the [...]

“There’s an assumption that private funding must always be acknowledged because it’s dirty, while public funding never needs to be acknowledged, because it’s pure.” Michael Duffy from ABC Radio National Counterpoint made that comment yesterday when he interviewed me about the Murray Mouth barrages.[1] Biologist Walter Starck [2] replied today with the following comment: “A [...]

LAST Monday on ABC TV’s Media Watch the sniggering Jonathan Holmes suggested that there was something wrong with Peter Ridd peer-reviewing my technical report ‘Plugging the Murray’s Mouth: The Interrupted Evolution of a Barrier Estuary’. Today I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint and Michael Duffy commented that Professor Peter Ridd said he might [...]

BIASED media coverage of natural resource use issues should be fertile ground for the ABC’s Media Watch, but despite efforts to draw their attention to this have displayed little or no inclination to cover it in the past. Then again, as some of the worst examples of biased coverage of environmental issues have emanated from [...]

I live in Queensland, a very large, resource rich northern state. For too many years we’ve had Labor governments that have run with very populist themes and policies. And we’ve had Chief Scientists that have actively ignored evidence to implement Labor politics. [1] Tonight Queensland Labor was annihilated at the ballot box and will likely [...]

For years now I’ve been writing about the barrages, really sea dykes, that block inflows from the Southern Ocean making the vast shallow coastal lagoons at the end of the Murray River completely dependent on Murray River inflows. Without the dykes the sea would push in each autumn and for longer periods during drought.[1] Somewhat [...]

THE CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology [BOM] are the peak Australian scientific institutions. Various governments in Australia rely on the scientific conclusions from these government-funded scientific institutions. The assumption is that the scientific advice from the CSIRO and BOM is not only reliable but reasonable. But is it?   A regular contributor to this blog, [...]