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.
25 March 2019
Fake Photographs At Heart of Peter Ridd’s Sacking
EARLY last year a professor of physics at James Cook University was sacked – after a successful career spanning some forty years. Peter Ridd had won many university awards, including the inaugural ‘Supervisor of the Year’, presumably nominated by one or more of his thirty-something PhD students. He published over 100 scientific papers and earned the university millions of dollars
11 March 2019
The Hottest Summer On Record Except For The Ones That We’ve Changed
This last summer has been hot in south-eastern Australia. But was it the hottest ever? Summer 80 years ago was arguably as hot, if not hotter. Australia’s Environment Minister, Melissa Price, also recently claimed this summer’s bushfires as a consequence of climate change. I grew up with stories from my late father of terrible bushfires – infernos – back in
16 February 2019
Bureau Rewrites History – Again, at Albany
THE Australian Bureau of Meteorology keeps remodelling the temperature record for Australia – and not just by a little bit. Temperatures are changed through a process known as homogenisation, and then changed again, sometimes by as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius for the one day. The temperatures as actually measured at Albany, and other places, have been changed by the
15 November 2018
Abbot And Marohasy Respond To Criticisms Of GeoResJ Paper
Historical Temperature Reconstructions and Estimating the Contribution of the Industrial Revolution to 20th Century Warming 1. Introduction During the 12th Century, the English philosopher, diplomat and bishop, John of Salisbury (1120-1180) wrote that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted-up and borne aloft on their
14 November 2018
Denying Comment From Experts, From The Marine Geophysical Laboratory
In the wake of the very high-profile launch of the WWF Save the Reef Campaign in June 2001, there was a flurry of newspaper articles. They uncritically reported the WWF claim that sediment was literally smothering the corals of the Great Barrier Reef – all the fault of farmers, whose activities needed to be better regulated. Many scientists were quoted
7 November 2018
The Prince and His Dump Trucks
THE World Wide Fund for Nature’s ‘Save the Reef’ Campaign was launched on 6th June 2001, which was World Environment Day that year. There was no forewarning. I woke-up that morning to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation explaining how many ‘dump trucks’ of mud sugarcane farmers where apparently off-loading onto Great Barrier Reef corals. It was the lead story for the morning news
2 November 2018
No Mud on My Barnacles
I lived for three years, from 2009 to 2012, in a delightful house just up from Lammermoor Beach with a view across to Great Keppel Island. Lammermoor Beach is part of the Mackay/Capricorn Management Area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Like many of the beaches along north eastern Australia, Lammermoor is aptly described as a ‘low-energy shoreline’. This
29 October 2018
Peter Ridd and the Science of Reef Science
THERE is science, and then there is activism in the name of science. How can we tell them apart: the activism versus the real science – and does it matter? Some would argue that activism is more important than science, to ensure the protection of the environment. After all, many would argue that economic interests often corrupted scientific findings, so
4 October 2018
A Carbon Neutral Climate
Jennifer Marohasy and John Abbot investigate what the world’s climate would be like if the Industrial Revolution never happened. What if there’d never been an industrial revolution? What if the ‘dark satanic mills’ decried by William Blake had never been built, and the fossil fuels stayed in the ground? According to official climate bodies like the International Panel on Climate
19 May 2018
The Climate Inquisition Burns A Heretic
Back in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing I could not possibly have envisaged it could contribute to the end of his thirty-year career as a university professor. Considering that Peter enrolled at James Cook University as an undergraduate back in 1978, he has been associated with that one
