There is no climate crisis in Australia

This blogpost comes from an interview of the Australian biologist Dr Jennifer Marohasy by Hannes Sarv of Freedom Research.

According to Marohasy, climate change is a natural phenomenon and CO₂ has nothing to do with it. In 2017, Marohasy and John Abbot published an article on temperature variations over the last 2,000 years, showing that climate change is not the result of an increase in anthropogenic carbon dioxide over the last century, but a natural process in nature. They used proxy data from tree rings, corals or lake sediments, which express earth’s warming and cooling cycles, with a variation of about 2ºC. Of course, alarmists didn’t agree.

According to her, there is ample evidence that there was a warmer period in Western Europe about a thousand years ago, which allowed, for example, the Vikings to settle in southern Greenland. In 1234, however, the last olive trees were destroyed in Germany as a result of a particularly harsh winter and Marohasy suggests this could mark the end of it. As is well known, the warmer period was followed by a much colder period, also known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted until the first half of the 19th century. Marohasy offers 1826 as the end of this period when Upernavik in north-western Greenland became habitable again.

When she worked for the sugar industry in Australia, “We were continually being told that the drought was caused by climate change and that it had never been so dry. And yet when I looked at the records, I could see that really we were just in a dry cycle that was likely to break with flooding rains, as it did”.

Are we living in an era of global boiling?

The climate is changing. And it is warming too now, according to Marohasy. But was the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres correct to say in July last year that we have entered an era of ‘global boiling’? Not according to Marohasy. She explains that through her work she has come to understand how temperature measurement data is actually handled and reported today. Marohasy says that the kind of linear upward trend in temperature on which today’s claims of global warming are based is not actually reflected in the raw data. Marohasy has looked at data from Australia, Indonesia, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Greenland, for example, and says the growth trend model has been plotted by a process of data homogenization and adjustment. According to Marohasy, in Australia the measurements of the last century actually show a cooling at the beginning of the graph, followed by a warming. “But what the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) does so that it has a fashionable record is it drops down the temperatures from the early part of the record to get this linear increase.” The next blogpost shows how data manipulation enhances “climate change” in Australia.

The data does not show that we are living in an era of climate catastrophe. “When they’re saying the drought is never going to end and you have to install water tanks, you have to have two minute showers, you have to stop growing these particular crops because they’re too water intensive, then people like me look at the data. And we say that actually it’s been drier before. It was drier a hundred years ago, it was drier in the 1930s when we had dust storms and we had very dry periods in Australia, as they had in the US. If you look at the US Environmental Protection Agency data you can see that in the 1930s they had terrible heat waves and we had terrible heat waves. We had drought in Australia in the 1930s and we also had it in the 1890s. And then you ask why are they saying it’s so terrible now when the data very clearly shows that it’s no worse than it was in the past”. Climate and weather change cyclically, and these cycles can be measured in both shorter and longer periods. “It’s getting to the warmest it’s been for 60 years but if we go back 120 years, it was this warm. If we go back a thousand years, it was probably a little bit warmer. If we go back 400,000 years you can see the Ice Ages every 100,000 years [according to an uniformitarian worldview]. So, there are cycles within cycles within cycles, affected by different natural phenomena”.

Climate change is also often associated with natural disasters, and it is said that there are more cyclones now that are more intensive. Marohasy has also looked at this data and disagrees. “Here in Australia we actually have a decrease in the number and intensity of cyclones, even though they say that with more carbon dioxide we would have an increase”. However, the BOM says, “There was a change to the definition for tropical cyclones in 1978 which led to some systems which would previously have been classified as tropical cyclones instead being considered sub-tropical systems. This contributes somewhat to the apparent decline in total numbers.”

Can CO₂ affect the climate?

Over the years, Marohasy has collaborated quite a bit with the Indonesian meteorology agency, presenting her forecasting models to them and consulting them on their use. “They can’t understand this obsession that the west has, places like Australia has, with carbon dioxide. They just don’t understand it”.

So where does the CO₂ problem even come from? The claim that CO₂ has a warming effect on the climate comes from a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, who made the claim in an article published in 1896. But it was not much remembered before the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, became the first leader of a major world power to start talking about how greenhouse gases will cause a climate catastrophe. Thatcher invoked Arrhenius and his theory, to argue against coal mining and in support of nuclear energy. It is worth recalling that the Thatcher government was engaged in privatisation efforts and a fight with striking coal miners. Thousands of miners lost their jobs. As a result, in 1984-85 she faced huge strikes by miners, which in some places escalated into riots.

The Thatcher government went on to fund the Hadley Centre at the Meteorological Office. Margaret Thatcher opened the Hadley Centre in May 1990 with Sir John Houghton who oversaw the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report published the same year. It is these IPCC reports, that have been published every few years since then, that provide the scientific impetus and legitimacy for the energy transition.

There is more CO₂ in the atmosphere now than there was a hundred years ago. But most of the carbon dioxide released is not anthropogenic. “I don’t actually think that’s going to have an effect if you reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide levels, because the amount being released naturally from the ocean is probably what’s driving the current trend. So, there’s no mechanism at the moment where people could actually have an impact on atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide”. For example, in the COVID-19 crisis when people travelled significantly less, “There was no effect on atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide”.

Because the oceans are warmer now, more carbon dioxide is being released. But carbon dioxide is not the cause of warming. “The ocean naturally warms up with these cycles that have nothing to do with human activity”. To put it simply, it is the Sun that warms the ocean, and the ocean in turn radiates that heat into the atmosphere. Claims that this is somehow reversed – for example by climate activist-politician Al Gore – and it is the CO₂ emissions that are warming the atmosphere and in turn, the ocean, are not true, “We know from the laws of thermodynamics that heat always goes from warmer to colder. And if you look at average temperatures, the ocean is warmer and it’s always warmer and it’s still warmer than the atmosphere. And that’s the direction of movement – from the ocean to the atmosphere. The oceans are warming the atmosphere and the atmosphere is not warming the ocean”.

Higher CO₂ levels, on the other hand, make the planet greener, because plants need it to grow. Drier areas will also become greener, because more CO₂ means plants don’t need as much water to grow. More carbon dioxide is good for agriculture because it causes higher crop yields.

The problem with energy

“I know this isn’t consensus science and most of the time we don’t have an opportunity to discuss this science because in the west there’s a huge industry pushing energy transition and they justify that on the basis that they don’t want carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels”. In Australia, too, there is currently a debate about whether to go nuclear or renewable after closing coal powered production. “The reality is we should not be closing down our coal fired power stations because they are reliable and they provide cheap energy that makes our industries competitive”. At the same time, wind farms are being built with heavy subsidies and making big money for powerful business groups while ordinary people’s electricity bills rise. “We are on the edge of an energy crisis here in Australia. We are losing particular industries because energy is becoming too expensive and too unreliable. And life is becoming more expensive for ordinary people”.

What’s more, the construction of large wind farms is damaging the natural environment, because space is needed for both wind turbines and power lines. This means, for example, clearing forests. “And it’s all being justified on the basis that we have a climate crisis and yet you look at the Great Barrier Reef, you look at how sea levels have changed, you look at the instrumental temperature record and you can see that there are just cycles. There’s no crisis at all”.

The Great Barrier Reef is not dying

Another example that has been cited over and over again over the years when talking about the climate change crisis concerns corals and the Great Barrier Reef. Data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science shows that corals are now there in record numbers. Marohasy knows the reef well – she has been diving and snorkeling there since she was seven years old and has started consistently documenting the situation in recent years. Whenever someone has told her about major damage and coral bleaching in an area, she has taken a professional photographer to document the situation. In 2022, for example, the bleaching of a reef named John Brewer was in the news around the world. Marohasy decided to document the situation. “I got there and there was a little bit of bleaching. But mostly I have never seen that reef look so beautiful and three months later the bleaching was gone”.

It’s not climate change or global warming that is damaging corals, but cyclones. And while the number and intensity of cyclones have decreased, they still do a lot of damage to corals. But no one even wants to go and see what the damage looks like. “I mean it’s just mad here in the West, the media reports this reef being in trouble when there was hardly any bleaching at all and they didn’t report its recovery from the bleaching which happened within 3 months. And now 2 years later that same reef has been absolutely smashed by a cyclone [Kirrily] and nobody wants to talk about it”.

Academic freedom replaced by cancel culture

In fact, it’s not just a question of what is and isn’t shared with the public, but how the scientists who critically analyse the claims of mainstream climate science are treated. The 2017 paper by Marohasy and Abbot, highlighted at the beginning of the article, in which they argued that climate change is in fact a natural part of life, and the treatment they got after publishing it is a good example. The IPCC estimates the total warming for the 20th century at 1°C and says it is entirely due to industrialisation, or CO₂. Marohasy and Abbot concluded in their study that the maximum contribution of industrialisation to climate warming over the 20th century could be in the order of 0.2°C. But even such a claim is seen as inappropriate to many in today’s world.

Marohasy says that she was a regular expert in the media a decade ago and was frequently asked to comment on weather events on TV. But all that changed and by 2012 she was already finding it difficult to publish her research. “And the 2017 paper created quite a stir and there was a whole Twitter campaign against me and against that paper. I’m blacklisted now. If I turn up at or have been invited to speak at particular events, the event organisers now say ‘the Australian Broadcasting Corporation won’t cover this event because you’re going to be there. So can you please not be on that panel anymore, because we want the mainstream media to cover it as they always have’”. Of course, there’s no logic to this behavior. Today, Marohasy has published far more scientific articles on climate than 20 years ago, when she was still a welcomed guest in the mainstream media. She has edited scientific books and has much more work experience. But it all doesn’t count. “The mainstream media will not tolerate my viewpoint”.

References

Abbot, J. & Marohasy J. 2017. The application of machine learning for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change, GeoResJ, 14, 36-46.
Marohasy, 2017 J “Most of the recent warming could be natural”.

Acknowledgement

This blogpost comes from an interview of Jennifer Marohasy in March 2024. She has a PhD in biology from the University of Queensland and is a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs (a non-profit think tank, dedicated to preserving and strengthening the foundations of economic and political freedom).

Posted, April 2024

Also see: Data manipulation enhances “climate change” in Australia