Jennifer Marohasy
Senior Fellow
Jennifer Marohasy is a Senior Fellow with responsibilities for Climate Change in the Research Program at the IPA.
Dr Marohasy has published in prestigious scientific and law journals over the last few years, these have included: Atmospheric Research, Advances in Atmospheric Research, Wetlands Ecology and Management, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, Public Law Review and Environmental Law and Management. She has also written for various newspapers and magazines including The Australian, The Courier Mail, The Herald Sun, and for ten years was a fortnightly columnist for Fairfax Media’s rural flagship, The Land. Dr Marohasy remains a regular contributor to e-journal On Line Opinion.
Dr Marohasy first worked for the IPA between 2003 and 2009; writing a seminal paper that showed rising-salinity in the Murray River was contrived – a product of computer modelling. Actual salinity levels had been falling for over 20-years as a consequence of successful government-sponsored drainage management programs in irrigations areas.
Between 2009 and 2015 Dr Marohasy was involved with various university research programs. Her re-appointment at the IPA in August 2015 followed the termination of an adjunct position at Central Queensland University following the ousting of Bjorn Lomborg from the University of Western Australia. Her work at CQU was wholly funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation, and this continues to be the source of funding for her employment at the IPA.
Dr Marohasy describes herself as a utilitarian libertarian: she much prefers appeals to reason, logic and evidence over authority and consensus.
26 May 2023
Bureau Capitulates: But Overseas Model Unlikely to Solve All Temperature Measurement Issues
It has only taken ten years, that is how long a few of us have been detailing major problems with how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology measures daily temperatures. Now, I’m informed, the Bureau are ditching the current system and looking to adopt an overseas model that it claims will be more reliable. There will be no media release. There
23 May 2023
Coral Snapshot 2022-23, & All the Unanswered Questions
Full marks to David Mills, writing in the Courier Mail, for asking why the government tends to bury good news reports about the Great Barrier Reef. There are a few other questions that I would like answered. Key government ministers, marine scientists, and climate scientists have been unable to acknowledge: Q1. Overall coral cover has been increasing since at least
1 May 2023
BOM Can’t Dodge Differences In Temperature Data
Since Graham Lloyd’s article, Mercury rising in Bureau of Meteorology probe row, was published on the front page of The Weekend Australian earlier this month, there has been some confusion regarding the availability of parallel temperature data. These are the temperatures handwritten into the field books of meteorological observations, both the temperatures as recorded by a mercury thermometer, and from the
23 April 2023
Australia-wide Assessment: Climate Change Or Instrument Change?
In the five years following the installation of probes in automatic weather stations (AWS) as they replaced mercury thermometers across Australia, the annual frequency of extremely hot days increased by an average 18.7%. This new analysis by Perth journalist and climate researcher Chris Gillham makes a mockery of claims by the Bureau that the transition from mercury thermometers to automatic
21 April 2023
Parallel Temperature Data, Except For Cape Otway Lighthouse
At Cape Otway Lighthouse overlooking Bass Strait, the highest daily January temperature ever recorded is 43.3°C on 24th January 1982, and the lowest January temperature ever recorded is 3.3°C on 2nd January 1900. In between some 30,000 (365 x 82) daily maximum and minimum temperatures were recorded by a succession of lighthouse keepers at 9am each morning, every day of
19 April 2023
Dr Jennifer Marohasy Discussing The Need For The BOM To Be Transparent On Sky News Australia
Australians deserve answers. We rely on the Bureau of Metrology to be a trusted source of data and forecasts, yet time and time again there are too many examples of where the BOM does not give enough consideration to transparency and accuracy. The IPA’s Jennifer Marohasy told Sky News Australia of her years’ long attempt to get accurate data from
19 April 2023
Mercury Thermometers Versus Probes in Automatic Weather Stations
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has replaced most of its mercury thermometers with platinum resistance probes in automatic weather stations. My assessment of nearly twenty years of parallel data from Mildura, and just three years of parallel data from Brisbane airport, indicates that the probes can record both hotter and colder than the mercury, but are not equivalent. UPDATEThere was some discussion
15 April 2023
Bureau Releases Limited Parallel Data from Brisbane Airport
How accurate is the official temperature history for your city or town? Statistical analysis of 3 years of maximum temperature data for Brisbane airport shows the temperatures recorded from the probe in an automatic weather station are significantly different from the mercury thermometer. This contradicts claims by the Bureau’s Director, Andrew Johnson, that measurements from these two instruments are equivalent.
26 March 2023
Re-imaging Tasmania’s Temperature History, Part 1
My good friend Patrick Lloyd, enamoured with the new Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT, sent me maximum temperatures for Tasmania as individual annual averages of all the daily values for all 155 weather stations since 1882. He had downloaded these values from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s website with the help of ChatGPT. He wanted to know from me if they showed
21 March 2023
The 1.5 C Temperature Fiction, Already Exceeded
It is all over the news, another climate change report from the IPCC – the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Of course, it tells us that the end is nigh unless we do something to prevent temperatures exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, not one of the contributors has any proven capacity to accurately forecast the weather more than
