Jennifer Marohasy

A PERSISTENT complaint from victims of the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria was that they had “received no warning”. Over and again we heard statements like this: “There was no fire anywhere, but the next thing, we had fire all around us. There was no word of warning, and we never stood a chance”. This [...]

ABOUT two months ago I received a “heads-up” from a mate who works in Canberra that Environment Minister Peter Garratt was considering listing prescribed burning as a threatening process under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act. At first I thought this was nonsense, but then I reflected on the attitudes towards prescribed burning that we [...]

THE catastrophic bushfires in Victoria this year, and the other great fires of recent years in Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT and South Australia are dramatic expressions not just of killing forces unleashed, but of human folly…     I am well aware of the drought, of the terrible conditions on the days of the fires, [...]

Roger Underwood disagrees that there has been “massive increases in burning” which are “pushing wildlife to the brink of extinction”.

I note that the Federal government has created a new agency called “The Department of Climate Change”. The department is not yet 10 months old, but is already well-established with a CEO, two assistant CEOs, four Divisions, thirteen Branches (including one devoted entirely to public affairs), and a large number of full-time public servants. Given [...]

I have recently made a superficial analysis of temperature trends at York, Western Australia, the nearest weather station to my place at Gwambygine. York is approximately 100 kms inland from the Indian Ocean, on about latitude 32. The weather data for York is interesting for two reasons: (i) there has been a continuously reporting weather [...]

Over the last 6 months, readers of The West Australian newspaper have been subjected to a barrage of hysteria over global warming. Very bad news stories of one kind or another are published almost every day, all with the common theme that civilisation as we know it is about to be destroyed. Some of these [...]

The ability to “read the play” is a quality often ascribed to successful politicians, businessmen and sportsmen. The term refers to the ability to predict events and then to take an advantageous position in expectation of the prediction coming to fruition. In the sporting arena it is best seen in champion tennis players like Lew [...]

Articles in The West Australian newspaper on 15th and 17th September 2007 suggested that global warming will lead to the virtual disappearance of Western Australia’s iconic karri forest. The articles quote Dr Ray Wills, a research scientist at the University of Western Australia’s Geography Department, who asserts that karri forests could be reduced to small [...]

Reports in the media and from fire management colleagues indicate that the recent horrific bushfires in Greece have parallels in Australia and were predictable. It is estimated that nearly 70 lives have been lost and close to 200,000 hectares of agricultural land, national parks and mountain forests have been incinerated. The loss of olive groves [...]