We all have choices in life. Some people lift us up, some people drag us down, and steal our time.
It is up to us as individuals to choose who and what, we respond to, who and what, we spend time with. This will ultimately determine what we become. It is also the case that we can go along with the popular (the zeitgeist), or we can take the time to think things through for ourselves and make the hard choices. It takes so much more discipline to be honest to the evidence: to reality.
Albert Einstein said:
Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better.
One of my favourite places is Noosa National Park, and the evidence etched in the rocks along that shoreline contradict so much of what is reported in the technical journals about climate change. As I began a recent blog post, should we believe the claims of experts or what we can see with our own eyes?
My first film was about exactly this, called ‘Beige Reef’ (and first released on YouTube here), it is about a beautiful coral garden denied by the experts including the head of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA).
After I came back from Bowen, from filming ‘Beige Reef’, a couple of opinionated Noosa locals told me that I should have gone to the far north of the Great Barrier Reef. They told me that was where the coral reefs experienced the worst bleaching. (These women claim to be so environmentally caring but perhaps they are mostly interested in ‘virtue signalling’. They certainly didn’t want to hear and see my evidence for healthy corals.) Bleaching is when corals turn stark white and expel their zooxanthellae. (It is claimed bleached corals are dead corals and our most vocal local environmentalists seem to prefer stories about ‘dead’ corals. This I guess, supports the popular notion/the zeitgeist that the planet is ruin. They live in paradise but everywhere they see disaster.)
Anyway, I went to The Ribbon Reefs in searching of coral bleaching in January 2020. I SCUBA dived everyday for a week, but it was difficult to find any bleaching.
At the Ribbons, I told I was four years too late, that the corals were badly bleached in April through to September 2016 but have since recovered. But I did find an underwater limestone cave on what is known as the ‘wild side’ of Ribbon Reef Number 10. You can see me swimming into this cave, and the state of the corals and sharks and also a giant potato cod in my second short film, ‘Clowns at the Ribbon’s Edge’.
I’m now planning a third underwater adventure! It is going to be so much fun, and include the skipper from ‘Beige Reef’, Rob McCulloch. If you want to be one of the first to know about what is planned, and where we will be diving, then subscribe to this website for my irregular emails with the tag line ‘Keeping You in the Loop’.
The mainstream media headlines do keep falsely claiming these same reefs are dying. I write various rebuttals, including a blog post just two days ago to try and explain how Terry Hughes can keep getting it so wrong. These are also advertised via my ‘Keeping You in the Loop’ emails.
So many of our once most trusted institutions are now engaged in little more than keeping us, the public, in a state of unnecessary and constant fear. It is so wrong. And it will stop people from visiting the still magical Great Barrier Reef.
Managers at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have for years misled the public on the state of the climate. It is not getting drier, and the extent to which some coastal locations may have warmed over the last hundreds years is unclear because of all the changes to the measurement methods. Also, the extent of the remodelling of the temperature record can now be explored through an interactive table, unique to this website, with maximum and minimum annual series for all 112 ACORN-SAT sites (versions 1 and 2) juxtaposed against the raw data.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade researching a technique for forecasting rainfall using artificial neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence. A list of my published technical papers detailing the technique can be found at https://climatelab.com.au/publications/.
Over the last year I’ve put time into editing a new book, ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020’. The second section of this book has an emphasis on ‘water’ in its various forms, including water vapour as a driver of tropical convection by physicst and friend Peter Ridd. The geographic location of interest is Antarctica, with a story about ‘wrestling’ penguins by biologist Jim Steele. The last chapter is philosophical and literary and categorises various high profile sceptics based on the extent of their perceived descent into ‘hell’, as defined by Dante’s Inferno. It is by my colleague Scott Hargreaves, who is very clever.
Climate science necessarily touches on many different scientific disciplines, and it is complicated. It can also be so much fun! Treat it as a puzzle, that is my advice in the book. Also, remember, it is much better to have questions that cannot be answered, than living and doing science according to answers that cannot be questioned!
It is a fact that we live on a rotating planet, differentially heated by the Sun, and mostly covered in sea water. The largest body of water is the Pacific Ocean, and on its south western edge is the Great Barrier Reef. This is arguably the largest coral reef system to have ever existed on planet Earth. It is but a thin veneer growing on top of at least five previous extensive reef systems; each destroyed by past dramatic falls in sea level. It lends itself to film making, at least for those prepared to jump over the edge and go under-the-water.
I am a scientist, natural historian, writer and hopefully soon to be film maker. I want to recast the climate narrative away from one of fear, towards awe in understanding natural climate cycles.
I will always base my arguments and conclusions on evidence, and I will always apply logic. Of course, science is a method. Science is never ‘settled’. Those who appeal primarily to the authority of science and the notion of a consensus are more interested in politics. Central to the scientific method is the hypothesis that can be tested: that can potentially be falsified. We must therefore always be open-minded, tolerant and ready to be proven wrong.
So much thanks for reading this far!
Jennifer Marohasy
Noosa, Queensland, Australia
17th October 2020
PS Lost time is never found.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.