FIRE in the landscape, or bushfire, is Australia’s most lethal and costly natural hazard. Big, uncontrollable bushfires can kill millions of trees and wild animals, thousands of farm animals, and sometimes humans too. Apart from deaths, bushfires incinerate property, such as bridges, farm fencing, homes, and even, a few years ago, an astronomical observatory. The [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
JULIA Gillard promised, if she was elected, that there would be no carbon tax. Tony Abbot promised, if he was elected, that he would scrap the carbon tax. But the learned ignorant promote mass action to get their way, all the while claiming tolerance, and respect for democracy. Many of the posters on display at [...]
WE know that General Circulation Models underpin the theory of anthropomorphic global warming, rely on supercomputers, are expense to run and mostly output nonsense [1]. Earlier this year I sat in a seminar as a UK climate scientist acknowledged all the limitations of General Circulation Models, but then went on to claim that they had [...]
MIKE Haseler was once a candidate for the Scottish Green party. He has worked in the wind industry, has knowledge of precision temperature controllers and is a blogger. He is also interested in how: “The two sides in the climate debate look at pretty much the same information and come to very different conclusions. Having [...]
“The thing about freedom is that its heights are limitless, and its lows are bottomless. Libertarians, I presume, look at that void and never consider that they will do anything but rise. And communalists, as the Research Institute dubbed the other end of the spectrum, probably look and are horrified by the many eventualities that [...]
In his review of the book ‘The Undiscovered Self’ by the psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Jung, Maxwell Cynn suggests that: “Dr. Jung noted that whenever individuals are pressed into a group an averaging effect occurs and part of the individual Self is sacrificed in order to fit-in to the norm of the group. We stop [...]
‘IN open societies where both scientists and the general public are equipped with critical skills and the tools of inquiry, not least enabled by the information revolution provided through the Internet, the ethos of science as open, questioning, critical and anti-dogmatic should and can be defended also by the public at large. Efforts to make [...]
Jennifer Marohasy is a scientist, author and speaker.
Dr Marohasy has a PhD from the University of Queensland, worked for twelve years as a researcher for the Queensland government, then six years as environmental manager for the Queensland sugar industry, and then six years as a senior fellow at the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs. She is currently an adjunct Research Fellow at Central Queensland University funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
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