Jennifer Marohasy

GEORGE Brandis says it is “deplorable” deniers are being excluded from the climate change debate and people who say the science is settled are ignorant and medieval. The attorney general called the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong, the “high priestess of political correctness” and said he did not regret his comment [...]

EASTER is about religion, which is about culture, which is about myth. I was raised on the myths of the Australian Outback, on the poems of Banjo Paterson where the heroes could be “hard and tough and wiry – just the sought that won’t say die”. The landscape was also tough, harsh, and certainly ready [...]

SEVERE Tropical Cyclone Ita, Category 5, is expected to move in a general southwest direction towards the far north Queensland coast tonight and into Friday, while possibly intensifying further. That’s the advice at the Bureau of Meteorology website. Neil Hewett, who has contributed so many beautiful photographs to this website, and his beloved Cooper Creek [...]

AT Bourke temperatures were carefully recorded at the post office for 125 years, from 1871 to 1996. But this record is ignored by those announcing new temperature records on local Bourke radio. They rely on a record that only goes back to 1998! From about 1952 through until 1996 the Postal Service staff carefully read [...]

Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either. Albert Einstein. THE Australian Bureau of Meteorology extrapolates from the particular to the general in the development of their annual climate statements, but with a complete lack of fidelity to the original recorded temperature values at many locations. Indeed [...]

Today, the online magazine spiked launched Free Speech Now!, a brand new campaign for ‘unfettered’ freedom of speech, with no ifs and no buts. The editor of spiked, Brendan O’Neill, says: ‘”Every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.” It is 350 years since Spinoza wrote those profound words. And yet [...]

THE United Nations’ Hague-based International Court of Justice yesterday ruled that Japan’s annual Antarctic whale hunt must stop because it is not scientific. I wonder how much trouble the Japanese did have getting their research on skinny whales published… remember the blog post back in 2008. Japan has said it will honour the ruling. It [...]

WORKING Group II, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published their contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report earlier today. The summary document begins by explaining that human interference with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for humans and natural systems. The report goes on to assess the impacts, how [...]

IF you know Bourke, you know Australia, wrote the famous Australian poet Henry Lawson. There is something quintessentially Australian about the place, the harshness of the western landscape, a tenacious spirit, the notion of ‘a fair go’. So what would you say if another Australian icon, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, was fiddling the temperature [...]

LATE yesterday Dennis Jensen, the Member for Tangney, spoke in the Australian Parliament about how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology plays “fast and loose” with critical temperature data. At the end of this important speech, Dr Jensen calls for an audit of the Bureau and in particular the methodology it uses for compiling temperature data. [...]