Jennifer Marohasy

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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.

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.

How Badly Have Environmentalists Misled and Frightened the Public!

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Once too scared to speak out, finally, Michael Shellenberger, is explaining some inconvenient facts about environmentalism and how it is hurting our Earth in a new book published by Harper Collins.

In a synopsis Shellenberger articulates what I have known for so long:

● The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.

[though it could be that hydrogen will be the solution at least for aviation, and this is all explained in chapter 15 of the book I’m editing]

● 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent.

● We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities.

● Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 per cent.

● Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.

[so pleased this is being acknowledged! and Patrick Moore as a founder and leader of Greenpeace so hurt the discipline of conservation biology, he should also apologise]

● ‘Free-range’ beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 per cent more emissions.

[Yes, but I like the idea that cows can also get to see the Sun]

● Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.

● The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.

It is also nice to finally hear an insider admit:

Why were we all so misled? In the final three chapters of ‘Apocalypse Never’ I expose the – financial, political and ideological motivations.

Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty ‘sustainable’.

And status anxiety , depression and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the klonopin alarmism.

I knew that too.

Michael Shellenberger even apologies:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide-objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public…
Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to ¬invest $US90bn into them. Over the past few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an ‘existential’ threat to human civilisation, and called it a ‘crisis’.

But mostly I was scared.

I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

Michael Shellenberger

He has some sobering comments in conclusion:

Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will ‘Apocalypse Never’ make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it. The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilisation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.

And bravo to The Australian newspaper for publishing something about this important new book.

It is good if the extent to which people have been misled begins to be acknowledged. But it is also so important that we know what we stand for, not only what we stand against.

More than anything else it is so important that individuals begin to speak from the heart about what they see in nature. That they begin to acknowledge the beauty all around them — that still exists in such abundance on this planet.

Me, and a rainbow on the horizon, visible from the Sunshine Beach Surf Club just a few days ago. Still in 2020 there are rainbows.

I look out over the ocean to see the sunrise, the moonrise and so often I see rainbows. How could anyone doubt the resilience of nature.

Leaning on the Lookouts, at the Great Barrier Reef

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Being able to sink below the waves at the edge of Australia’s continental shelf with the reef sharks and the colourful corals, is a rare privilege that I enjoyed just last week. It is possible because Jacques Cousteau invented the aqualung in 1942 providing a system for breathing and swimming safely at depth.

Ribbon Reef No. 10 is the longest of these most northern outer barriers with an inside (westerly-facing) edge that drops to 40 metres and an outside (easterly-facing) edge that drops vertically to 2,000 metres. This Ribbon also has what are called ‘Patches’, as shown in the screen shot from drone footage.

At the southern tip of this ribbon is an opening that was once where the Starke River entered the sea; that was more than 16,000 years ago when sea levels were up to 120 metres lower than they are today. This opening is between Ribbon No. 10 and Ribbon No. 10, Patches No. 3.

Goggle Gardens is a dive site on the sheltered side of Ribbon No. 10, Patches No. 3 (GBRMPA Number 14-153).

That river canyon is now underwater with strong currents, that wash in nutrient rich upwelling from the Pacific Ocean twice a day. The water rushes in, and then out. So I was pleased that there was a lookout on the top deck of our boat the entire time I was diving, with a tender handy, should I come up in a current that I couldn’t kick against and needed to be picked up. In fact, I always surfaced at the stairs to the boat, thanks to the great navigation skills of my underwater buddy.

Leaning on the Lookout while flying my drone Skido from the top deck.

On the sheltered side of Ribbon No. 10, Patches No. 3, is the dive site known as Goggle Gardens. The corals here are at 15 metres and were totally bleached white from March to October 2016.

What I learnt from a diver and her photographs is that white and bleached coral is not necessarily dead coral. The zooxanthellae — unicellular algae that give coral its colours and normally feeds it with energy from the sun via photosynthesis — were expelled, as the corals were stressed by the exceptionally warm waters during the summer of 2015 – 2016.

But the corals at this dive site did not die.

Coral polyps also have tentacles, and these tentacles were used to feed on small animals and plankton and also to clean away bad algae that would otherwise settle and smother it.

So, corals are not necessarily totally dependent on zooxanthellae, they can be omnivorous.

In fact, bleached coral can take-back zooxanthellae, become colourful again, and reshoot after months of being stark white and bleached.

I hope to show how this happened at this dive site in my next mini-documentary.

I’ve even been told, and may be able to get footage, of bleached corals spawning!

My buddy and underwater photographer dived this site three times last week, and we have so much footage. If you want to know exactly when this film will be released, then consider subscribing for my irregular e-newsletters.

Corals at a dive site knowns as Twin Towers, photographed in January 2020.

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The feature image at the very top of this post is me with a large and friendly Potato cod, taken at one of the Ribbon reefs in January 2020.

UPDATE 10TH FEBRUARY 2020:
The map has been replaced from the original posting, I had incorrectly referred to Patches No. 3 as Ribbon No. 11. There is no Ribbon No. 11.

Senate Inquiry into Water Quality at the Great Barrier Reef: My Submission

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Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport

Identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence-based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef

THIS submission relates to the first term of reference for the Senate inquiry: The existing evidence-base on the impact of farm water runoff on the health of the Great Barrier Reef and catchment areas.

STOP.

I have been advised that my submission has been received. Further I have been advised that:

A submission to a committee becomes a committee document, and it is for the committee to decide whether to receive it as evidence and whether to publish it. This means that you should not provide your submission to others or make it public prior to the committee’s decision to do so. While submissions to the committee are protected by parliamentary privilege, their unauthorised release or distribution is not.

So, I have removed the information that I had posted here concerning my submission and its recommendation.

GO. THE SUBMISSION HAS NOW BEEN POSTED ONLINE BY THE COMMITTEE, SO I AM REPOSTING HERE (JANUARY 2, 2020)

Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport

Identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence-based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef

This submission relates to the first term of reference for the Senate inquiry: The existing evidence- base on the impact of farm water runoff on the health of the Great Barrier Reef and catchment areas.

In order to address this issue it is necessary to have some water quality data. This data has been collected over decades by the many port authorities along the Queensland coast, by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), and various government departments that often change their name. For example, there was a report published in 1999 jointly by the Department of Environment and Heritage and the Department of Natural Resources entitled ‘Testing the Waters: A Report on the Quality of Queensland Waters’.

This report concluded:

“It is not possible to provide a simple summary of water quality across an area as large and varied as Queensland. However, a number of general comments can be made. Overall, the water quality maps indicate that while a significant proportion of sites reflect good water quality conditions, there are also a large number which indicate moderate (slightly impacted) conditions. Only relatively few are indicative of poor water quality conditions.

“Point discharge from many urban areas have impacts on water quality in their vicinity. Because urban areas are concentrated along the coastal fringe, most of these impacts occur in estuarine waters. However, these impacts are considerably less than they were 20 years ago and there is continuing management effort focussed on bringing point discharge under control…”

The report went on to state that future editions of statewide water quality reports will build on the information presented in what was then considered the ‘initial report’, with few reports likely to give a more definitive indication of long term trends in water quality.

In fact, since 1999 despite increasing expenditure in the area of water quality monitoring it is increasingly difficult to access basic water quality data. The situation is absurd, and I am told it reflects the state and federal government’s desire to maintain the perception of declining water quality, while in reality, the situation is improving. There could be general improvement because local governments have spent large amounts of money on better sewerage treatment, and rural industries have received significant funding to fence riparian areas, and more generally improve their land management practices.

Yet we are told that water quality continues to deteriorate, and this claim underpins increasingly regulation of industries that is the subject of this senate inquiry.

The first term of reference of this inquiry assumes an impact from farming on the Great Barrier Reef. It is important that the committee actually establish the nature and magnitude of this impact
by way of real evidence. Ideally a detailed assessment of changes in key water quality parameters at relevant geographical and temporal scales will be provided.

So far key reports, for example a much quoted recent technical study by Marine Ecological Consultant Dr Daniela Ceccarelli, rely on overseas datasets that use obscure methods for measuring water quality. It is difficult to understand why the GBRMPA collects detailed water quality data, and then scientists like Ceccarelli and colleagues extrapolated from indirect measures.

Given the importance of understanding changes in water quality over time it is important that this inquiry ensure the following information be made publicly available without delay:

Relevant water quality data including nutrient concentrations (e.g. chlorophyll a) and sediment loads (turbidity, e.g. Kd4010) at a daily, monthly and annual time scale for every major port, and every major inshore coral reef, along the Queensland coast since at least 1975. This is when this water quality data was first collected in a comprehensive and regular way.

Just today, Friday 8th November 2019, I was diving the HMAS Brisbane Wreck off Mooloolaba close to my home in south east Queensland. My mind is still buzzing with the extraordinary diversity of reef fish (so many of all shapes and sizes) and corals (such diversity and so colourful) that I saw. This inshore reef just to the south of the Great Barrier Reef is so new: the old war ship having only been sunk into 28 metres of water 14 years ago in July 2005.

This new healthy coral reef ecosystem, with so much diversity, has come to be over the same period of time that studies by Ceccarelli and others claim there has been wide spread deterioration in water quality affecting off shore coral reefs. The impression is that if we don’t tackle ‘water quality locally’ and ‘climate change globally’ all reefs will continue to see a significant decline in coral coverage. It also follows that new inshore reefs, like the coral reef that I visited yesterday, that was teeming with colour and new life could not exist.

In August I spent 10 days snorkelling, paddle boarding, and droning over the coral reefs of the northern and southern Whitsundays. I started at Horseshoe bay that is right in Bowen township, in fact there is a coffee shop within perhaps 250 metres of the southern headland where there are a great diversity of colourful corals growing on the granite.

I was surprised to see such colourful, healthy corals straight-off the beach and so accessible from the mainland/a north Queensland town. A family can train/bus/drive to this local beach at Bowen and go snorkelling and find many of the corals found throughout the Great Barrier Reef. Indeed, the bays and headlands around Bowen offer an opportunity for anyone to see corals, without spending a lot of money. Yet newspaper headlines quoting leading academics including Professor Terry Hughes claim inshore corals in this region have been destroyed by global warming.

About two kilometres from Horseshoe Bay at the entrance to Bowen Harbour, at the southern end of Stone Island, scientists curtailed a long transect across a reef flat of dead corals. The scientists ended it just 30 metres from the reef’s edge where there is so much live coral to be found.

The edge of this fringing reef slopes to the sea floor with prolific growth and great diversity of hard and soft corals species. This reef edge, perhaps 20 metres wide in some places, extends for perhaps 2 kilometres around the western edge of Stone Island. Yet in the research report published in the prestigious journal Nature, it is claimed there are no live Acropora at this reef and describes only dead corals along the transect.

As reported by Graham Lloyd in The Weekend Australian (7 September 2019), I saw and photographed healthy branching Acropora and also large pink plate coral on 25 August 2019 — some of the plate corals were more than 1 metre in diameter at this reef edge. David Wachenfeld, the chief scientist at GBRMPA is an author of this most misleading study that appeared intent on finding only that part of the fringing reef system with dead corals.

It is the case that in nature, as in life, we can sometimes find whatever we are looking for and this is especially the case at some inshore reefs where there is only live coral at that reef’s edge.
At some inshore reefs, if we look only for disaster and catastrophe it can be found in the rubble of the back reef from previous cyclones or from sea level fall.

Cyclones and sea level change – especially localised dramatic falls in sea level associated with El Niño events that cause widespread bleaching – will destroy individual coral gardens. But reef communities can recover if they are healthy and are spread over a critically large area. It is reefs that become infested, for example with crown-of-thorn star fish, that lack resilience and may not recover from natural disasters.

Corals at inshore reefs are particularly subject to natural extremes of temperature, sea level change, and other environmental hazards, such as outbreaks of crown-of-thorn starfish.

Given that the Great Barrier Reef, as one ecosystem, comprises nearly 3000 individual reefs stretching for 2000 kilometres, damaged areas can always be found somewhere. And a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today, may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow — though neither the intensity nor frequency of cyclones is increasing at the Great Barrier Reef despite climate change.

Dr Jennifer Marohasy, PO Box 692, Noosa Heads Q 4567 8th November 2019

Me, underwater diving HMAS Brisbane earlier today, on 8th November 2019. I took the photograph of the two ‘Nemos’ on the front deck of the wreck a few minutes after this photograph was taken, the two ‘Nemos’ feature at the top of this blog post.

Bureau Erases Goulburn Record Minimum Temperature: Set Sunday 2 July 2017

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GOULBURN is a town, to the southwest of Sydney, known for its maximum-security prison. It is also a place, that by Australian standards gets quite cold. Temperatures have been measured at the airport since 1988, and the lowest temperature ever record in July is officially -9.1 degrees Celsius.

In fact, Sunday morning this record was smashed!

It got down to -10.4 degrees Celsius, at 6.17am on Sunday 2nd July. This was the official Bureau recording for Goulburn.

The observation sheet shows a minimum of -10.4, this temperature is recorded every second and downloaded every minute. The lowest value recorded becomes the minimum for the day. Except the Bureau has not recorded this value as the minimum.

Except, the Bureau has since erased this measurement.

According to the Bureau’s own rules, the coldest temperature record during a 24-hour period to 9am is recorded as the minimum for that day. So, for Sunday 2 July the carry-over minimum should be -10.4 degrees Celsius. But instead the summary documentation shows -10.0. There is now no public record of -10.4 degrees Celsius.

The summary for Goulburn for Sunday 2 July 2017 incorrectly shows the minimum as -10.0 degree Celsius. It would be inconsistent with global warming theory for the current record to be smashed by a whole 1.3 degree Celsius. So, the Bureau homogenise the temperature record, changing the actual measurement to something more consistent with their perception of how reality should be – with what temperature should be.

I would have the managers at the Bureau put in the Goulburn jail.

*****

Update 9pm Tuesday evening

So, the Bureau has now acknowledged that it really was -10.4 degree Celsius at Goulburn on Sunday morning, and corrected the ‘Daily Weather Observations’ page for Goulburn.

By Tuesday evening this ‘Daily Observations’ sheet had been corrected, now showing -10.4 degree Celsius for Goulburn on Sunday morning.

However, the Bureau has so far not updated the key CDO Online database, the official record of temperatures for Goulburn airport.  This is the dataset used to calculate regional, national and global temperatures.  Rather than replace the bogus -10.0 degree Celsius with the correct -10.4, they are leaving a blank.   Not good enough.

*****

Update 6am Tuesday 10 July 

The following screenshot is provided as further evidence that the Bureau’s ‘quality control’ changed the actual reading of -10.4, to -10.0 which was then entered into the CDO database.  After protests the -10.0 value was removed and no reading recorded.  After more protests, the correct value of -10.4 was inserted.  This is unprecedented.

In this screenshot, taken on the morning of Tuesday 4 July, the bogus value of -10.0 has been entered into the CDO database.

It was not until two days later that the correct value was inserted, as shown in the following screen shot – taken this morning.