Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for December 2021

Come Celebrate High Tide on the Rocks – Weather Permitting

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I have been waiting for catastrophic sea level rise to wash me from the rock platform a few headlands around from where I live at Sunshine Beach in Noosa Shire about halfway along the east coast of Australia that is on the edge of the western South Pacific Ocean.

I like to stand on that platform of sandstone, sandstone that perhaps dates to the Jurassic – the time of the dinosaurs – and thumb my nose at all the catastrophe on the nightly news about global warming and rising sea levels.

The highest tide this year is forecast for 8.27 am on Monday 3rd January (2022) at 2.29 metres.

It just might happen this year, that I get washed away.   If there is a low-pressure system offshore and big winds, as forecast.

We were there on that platform for the very highest tide last year, but the waves never made it even to our ankles.  So, much for catastrophic sea level rise, I thought.

Bruce and Nick on the rock platform below Boiling Pot Lookout for the highest annual tide this last year, at 8.51 am on 28th February 2021.

The cliff face behind reaches up perhaps 30 metres to the famous Boiling Pot Lookout.

There is a wave cut notch running right around the base of the cliff face – where the rock platform begins.

The cliff face has been formed by undercutting: from waves swirling beneath until they bring down great lumps of rock, to be removed by the wash.

And so, the headland has receded landward, and the platform become wider.  But it’s not happening anymore, because sea levels are not as high as they used to be.

Logically, sea levels must have once been much higher because now even on the highest tide for the year the waves don’t reach the bottom of the cliff face, the notch.   On highest tides long ago, the waves must have smashed against the cliff face.

Drone photograph of us on 28th February 2021 on the rock platform in front of the cliff face waiting to be washed away.

According to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (AR6) – temperatures are the warmest they have been for at least the last 125 000 years.

Has it really been that long since the ocean lapped at the base of this cliff below the Boiling Pot Lookout?   Is my favourite rock platform that old – 125 000 years old?  Has it been just so wide for that long?

There are marine potholes in the sandstone just two rock platform to the southeast, towards Tea Tree Bay.   The fracture around one of the rings suggests a pre-existing body, possibly a fossilised tree trunk.  A geologist emailed me two years ago: note the pattern of dimples around the pothole which, if it is a Jurassic age sediment could be due to the presence of roots of Taxodium; I’ve posted a picture of that swamp cypress at an earlier blog post, click here.

Drone photograph of my favourite marine pot holes and see the ‘dimples’ about it, taken on the very highest tide two years ago, on 10th February 2020.

Various texts on the geology of this area suggest that the sandstone was indeed laid down about 180 000 000 years ago.  Back then the east coast of Australia faced south and this region was far inland and an intact sedimentary basin – far from the waves and the sea tides.

That was a long time ago, 180 million years ago.

When did the ocean first reach the sandstone and begin eroding it, forming the cliff face below Boiling Pot Lookout?

This is just one of the questions that I will ponder as I face the ocean next Monday from my favourite wave-cut platform below the lookout, weather permitting.

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Standing on rocks is what rock fishers do, and it is considered one of the most dangerous sports in Australia with 158 deaths in the 13 years to 2017. To reduce the risk of injury it is advisable to:

  • Wear a lifejacket
  • Check tides weather and surf conditions
  • Take personal responsibility, think twice and assess my safety
  • Plan an escape route in case I am washed into the water
  • Wear the right gear i.e. lifejacket, appropriate footwear, lightweight clothing
  • Never fish/go alone, and make sure you tell someone where you are going and when you will be back
  • Look for Angel Rings or someone other floatation device to throw to someone in trouble
  • Call 000 if assistance is required.

There is more information at my sea level change page, click here.  If you like sharing, the short link to this blogpost is https://wp.me/p3uL4U-4Yf

**** UPDATE  31st December 2021

Thanks to everyone who promoted this blog post at Facebook. More than 6,000 saw it on that medium.

The Maverick Healer: Jesus

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It’s Christmas Day.  An annual event commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ.  He was a healer, and in the most empowering of ways.    Sometime just through simple touch.  He was also an outcast, decried by the elites of his time, he was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate the Roman governor of Judaea under the emperor Tiberius.  Sentenced to death not because he stole something, or killed someone, but because he challenged their authority and more than anything else tried to bring people together.

Two thousand years later, and I’ve woken up this morning to a story in the Epoch Times about Fired Health Care Workers in the US.

Many health care workers, once hailed as heroes for working throughout the pandemic, now settle into the holiday season without jobs because of their personal medical decisions.

In North Carolina, Carlton DeHart was working as an advanced heart failure coordinator nurse for the Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center in Charlotte when she was fired in September for not meeting the deadline to get vaccinated.

Because DeHart was undergoing fertility treatment, she told The Epoch Times, she decided against it, adding that she didn’t feel comfortable ‘adding a not-long tested unknown into my body.’

She chose not to file for an exemption because, she said, ‘it’s a form of compliance.’

She doesn’t regret the decision, she said, and with the reducing rates of efficacy, changing definitions of what it means to be fully vaccinated, increasing reports of side effects, and the censorship surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, she’s ‘still determined not to comply.’

Though DeHart misses her team and her patients, she said doesn’t miss the ‘top-down draconian hospital politics’ that pushes allopathic treatment.

Her hope is that the firings will propel a new medical community forward that doesn’t lean into the heavily prescribed drugs, radiation, and surgery but into more innovations outside of orthodox medicine.

‘I think we were moving that way anyway because people weren’t happy with the corporate care they were getting, and this will hurry that along,’ DeHart said.

Today, on this Christmas Day, my heart goes out to all of those who have chosen to transcend the corporate and the mandated and to try a different way.

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I’ve extracted the feature image (at the very top of this blog post) from some drone footage shot by Stuart Ireland flying behind Russell Island from our little boat Kiama, with Rob McCulloch and me.

2021, New Year Wishes and Unreliable Weather

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If I were the head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, I would make more skilful weather and climate forecasting my priority. I would put a system in place for measuring improvement, and I would make sure the team of meteorologists believed it was possible to improve, not only in their skill at providing daily weather forecasts, but also in seasonal rainfall forecasts.

Back in June 1944, British Meteorologist James Stagg was so skilful with his forecasting that that he could reliably advise General Eisenhower that there would be a lull in the storm. This information allowed the successful D-Day landing of 156,000 soldiers in Normandy to go ahead.

It is possible to forecast lulls in storms, and El Niño and La Niña events, because the passage of the Moon overhead is regular and cyclical. In the same way that artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be used to mine historical data on our social media preferences, interpret medical scans, and underpin driverless car technology, so too this technology could be used to generate more reliable weather and climate forecasts. John Abbot and I showed its application to monthly rainfall forecasting in a series of research papers and book chapters published from 2012 to 2017. They are listed at the end of this note. How the years go by.

If I was the head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, I wouldn’t be asking for an audit of the current system because I know that the tools my Bureau uses (simulation modelling) are not fit for the task at hand. In the same way I wouldn’t be asking for an audit of coral reef research. I would use the money instead to get some proper statistically rigorous programs in place for monitoring coral cover and water quality, and monitoring the skill of weather and climate forecasting – and of coral bleaching.

One of my proudest achievements of 2021 was showing how just three of us (Stuart Ireland, Leonard Lim and me) over a short two days working from a little speed boat could lay 36 transects at the inshore Pixie Reef just to the northeast of Cairns, and upload the photographs (with the help of Jaco Vlok) leaving a permanent record of the corals in different habitat types at that reef for that moment in time.  Pixie reef was recorded as more than 65 per cent bleached in 2016. That was an El Niño year, and also a year of relatively low sea levels along the western Pacific. You can see the state of Pixie Reef as it was in February 2021, five years later, for yourself, by clicking on each of the 360 thumbnail photographs published on my website.  Most of the corals are looking so beautiful.

Stuart Ireland with tape measure and camera just on 9am, 24th February 2021 at Pixie Reef.

As the Moon is the driver of La Niña–El Niño cycle, so changes in its orbital path correspond with periods of bleaching including the 2016 bleaching, as well as the recent wet weather along the east coast of Australia. James Stagg understood the importance of lunar cycles, and so do the Chinese. A technical paper by Jialin Lin and Taotao Qian entitled ‘Switch Between El Niño and La Niña is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing’ is worth reading and is open access at ResearchGate.  I didn’t get a chance to mention it when I was recently on Sky TV with Andrew Bolt.  Andrew reminded us that not so long ago we were told by Tim Flannery that Australia’s reservoirs would never fill again because we were doomed to drought – forever.    He has been proven so wrong by the cycles of flooding since.

Arthur Day contributed chapter 4 to Climate Change: The Facts 2020. Recently, he sent me some more information on Antarctica. I published this at my blog along with a video Stuart Ireland made after he visited Antarctica a few years ago – when he got to swim with the seals. It’s magical.

Antarctica is a long way from the Great Barrier Reef, but it is the temperature and pressure gradients between the two – or at least between the Poles and the Equator – that can have a major impact on the intensity of the Earth’s weather systems.

The good news for the corals is that the 2020–2021 Australian cyclone season was another ‘below average’ season, producing a total of eight tropical cyclones with just three of these categorised as severe.  This means last summer there was not only fewer cyclones, but they were less severe cyclones.  However, this trend will likely reverse – because the climate is always changing.

Much thanks to the Bureau for updating the chart to this year, to the 2020-2021 season. The data and report is here: http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/tropical-cyclone-knowledge-centre/history/climatology/

We end 2021 in eastern Australia, which borders to the western South Pacific, with reservoirs full of fresh water, beautiful corals just offshore, not to mention very high vaccination rates. Australians should be confident about the year ahead even if our Bureau of Meteorology keeps fudging an increasingly unreliable temperature record to falsely claim imminent catastrophe. I will be writing much more about this next year – in 2022.

Before finishing this last blog post to you all for the year, I would like to mention the late Christian Kerr and Rob McCulloch. The first a political journalist, the other a marlin fisherman – two very different men who were both such good friends to me.   We lost both this last year.

Christian Kerr would sometimes text or phone after I sent out one of my irregular e-newsletters; he would ask if he could republish something in The Spectator Australian Online. Consequently, he launched one of my most important papers, co-written with John Abbot, about using artificial intelligence to distinguish between natural and man-made global warming. It is the first of the papers listed below.

Living in Noosa I managed to escape much of the lockdown insanity that so affected Christian and many of my other friends and colleagues in Melbourne. Indeed, while much of Melbourne was house-bound, I went on a wonderful Great Barrier Reef adventure with Rob McCulloch all the way to Myrmidon Reef at the end of last year, and to Pixie Reef earlier this year. More recently I was diving Heron Reef.

Rob McCulloch and I planned the trip to Myrmidon in September 2020 in order to search for the monster corals. That was after one of his clients from Sydney cancelled because of a last-minute COVID-19 border closure. Rob was known as one of the best marlin fishermen in Australia. He is remembered in the short documentary Finding Porites, which is dedicated to his memory. You can watch it on YouTube, here.

Neither Christian Kerr nor Rob McCulloch waited for other people to do things for them, or to audit things for them. I will miss their courage and their kindness, but especially their enthusiasm for my work and my writings.

Thank you especially to the B. Macfie Family Foundation for continuing to fund my work through the Institute of Public Affairs.

John Roskam will step down as executive director of the IPA early in the New Year.   John backed me to set-off with Rob McCulloch on the little boat Kiama to find the monster corals and trusted me to edit the last two climate change books.   I will always be so grateful for these opportunities.

Best wishes to you for a happy Christmas and prosperous New Year. And remember, lost time is never found.

Corals fringing Heron Island, November 2021. Photo credit Stuart Ireland.

The photograph at the top is of me under-the-water offshore from Heron Island just a month ago. I’ve written a first blog post on the trip, here.  There will be more next year about Heron Island, and the need for some quality assurance of underwater photographs used as evidence of mass coral bleaching.

Key publications with John Abbot, 2012 to 2017

Abbot, J. & Marohasy J. 2017. The application of machine learning for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change, GeoResJ, Volume 14, Pages 36-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gf.2017.08.001

Abbot, J. & Marohasy, J. 2017. Skilful rainfall forecasts from artificial neural networks with long duration series and single-month optimisation, Atmospheric Research, Volume 197, Pages 289-299. DOI10.1016/j.atmosres.2017.07.01

Abbot, J. & Marohasy, J. 2017. Forecasting extreme monthly rainfall events in regions of Queensland, Australia, using artificial neural networks. International Journal of Sustainable Development & Planning, Volume 12, Pages 1117-1131.DOI 10.2495/SDP-V12-N7-1117-1131.

Abbot, J. & Marohasy, J. 2017. Application of artificial neural networks to forecasting monthly rainfall one year in advance for locations within the Murray Darling Basin, Australia, International Journal of Sustainable Development & Planning. Volume 12, Pages 1282-1298. DOI 10.2495/SDP-V12-N8-1282-1298.

Abbot, J. & Marohasy, J. 2016. Forecasting monthly rainfall in the Bowen Basin of Queensland, Australia, using neural networks with Nino indices. In AI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Eds. B.H. Kand & Q. Bai. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-50127-7_7.

Abbot, J. & Marohasy, J. 2016. Forecasting monthly rainfall in the Western Australian wheat-belt up to 18-months in advance using artificial neural networks. In AI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Eds. B.H. Kand & Q. Bai. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-50127-7_6.

Marohasy, J. & Abbot J. 2016. Southeast Australian Maximum Temperature Trends, 1887–2013: An Evidence-Based Reappraisal. In Evidence-Based Climate Science (Second Edition), Ed. D. Easterbrook. Pages 83-99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-804588-6.00005-7.

Marohasy, J. & Abbot, J. 2015. Assessing the quality of eight different maximum temperature time series as inputs when using artificial neural networks to forecast monthly rainfall at Cape Otway, Australia, Atmospheric Research, Volume 166, Pages 141-149. doi: 10.1016/j.atmosres.2015.06.025.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J. 2015. Using artificial intelligence to forecast monthly rainfall under present and future climates for the Bowen Basin, Queensland, Australia, International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning, Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 66 – 75. DOI: 10.2495/SDP-V10-N1-66-75.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J. 2015. Using lagged and forecast climate indices with artificial intelligence to predict monthly rainfall in the Brisbane Catchment, Queensland, Australia, International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning. Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 29-41.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J., 2015. Improving monthly rainfall forecasts using artificial neural networks and single-month optimisation in the Brisbane Catchment, Queensland, Australia. WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 196: 3-13.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J., 2015. Forecasting of monthly rainfall in the Murray Darling Basin, Australia: Miles as a case study. WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 197: 149-159.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J. 2014. Input selection and optimisation for monthly rainfall forecasting in Queensland, Australia, using artificial neural networks. Atmospheric Research, Volume 138, Pages 166-178.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J. 2013. The application of artificial intelligence for monthly rainfall forecasting in the Brisbane Catchment, Queensland, Australia. River Basin Management VII. WIT Press. Editor C.A. Brebbia. Pages 125-135.

Abbot J. & Marohasy J. 2013. The potential benefits of using artificial intelligence for monthly rainfall forecasting for the Bowen Basin, Queensland, Australia. Water Resources Management VII. WIT Press. Editor C.A. Brebbia. Pages 287-297.

Abbot J., & J. Marohasy, 2012. Application of artificial neural networks to rainfall forecasting in Queensland, Australia. Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 29, Number 4, Pages 717-730. doi: 10.1007/s00376-012-1259-9.

Crown-of-thorn starfish, Heron Reef, 10th November 2021. Photo credit Stuart Ireland.

Christian Kerr – Hilarious, Insightful and Now Gone

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He liked people, but he took no one too seriously.   He thought most of the reporting on catastrophic climate change absurd.  For a time, he would text me asking if he could republish my latest blog post.  That was when he was the online editor for Flat White where short articles, and gossip from Australia politics is published under The Spectator Australia banner.

The most successful of the pieces he republished from me was ‘Big Data Finds the Medieval Warm Period – No Denial Here.’

It begins:

According to author Leo Tolstoy, born at the very end of the Little Ice Age, in quite a cold country:  ‘The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.’

So, our new technical paper in GeoResJ (vol. 14, pages 36-46) will likely be ignored.  Because after applying the latest big data technique to six 2,000 year-long proxy-temperature series we cannot confirm that recent warming is anything but natural – what might have occurred anyway, even if there was no industrial revolution.

A lesser editor might have tried to remove all the qualifiers in that last long sentence: because, after, cannot, anything, anyway, but, even if there was not.

Not Christian.  He was laughing with me.

Big data finds the Medieval Warm Period – no denial here

He told me it was the most viewed article at Flat White that year – in 2017.

The last time we spoke, and laughed, was August.  I was in Adelaide trying to work out how to get back to Queensland as the border had just closed to me.  He was in Melbourne trying to work out how to get to his father’s funeral in Adelaide.  If it wasn’t for covid we would have meetup in Adelaide and had a meal together. Instead, he arrived and went straight into quarantine.   I know it was an awful, awful experience for him.

Now he’s dead, at just 56.

He was unwell, and immune compromised, these last few years.  But he never elaborated.  When he wanted to change the subject, it was always to his children.  He adored them both: Rupert and India.   I can’t image their grief.

Christian Kerr was most famous back more than a decade when he was writing under the pseudonym of Hillary Bray for Crikey.com.   They have several articles about him today, including comment from Susan Brown that:

Christian was complex; he was not always right or easy, but was always in public a fearless contrarian. He set a fire in Australian politics and created a form of accountability which lit up many dark corners. He had more self-doubt than many realised. He loved his kids with a heart and pride the size of the universe. He had brilliant taste in music. He had a deep humanity and he suffered a lot for his intelligence, hunger for knowledge and strong values.

When he was suffering a lot physically, I wrote to him in 2019 to say I was going to Lourdes. I said I was an imperfect vessel being an atheist, but knowing he was a very devout Catholic asked if he would like me to say a prayer for him. He came back with: “Would appreciate that very much Susan. Just three key words, please. If I could be granted health, strength and wisdom.”

Vale Christian Kerr.