Author: Graham Readfearn

A WHISTLEBLOWER has claimed approvals for two multi-billion dollar gas export projects in Australia were waved through government despite warnings that key information on a range of environmental impacts were either missing or inadequate. Environment assessment specialist Simone Marsh, who had been on secondment to the Queensland Government’s Department of Infrastructure and

I IMAGINE only a small percentage of people reading this have had any journalism training, but don’t let that stop you from pondering the following ethical question. If you read a newspaper story that included a direct quote from someone – let’s say, for instance, UK climate scientist Dr David Viner

A LEADING Australian free-market think tank with close ties to the country’s conservative Liberal Party has revealed its plan for climate change – abolish it. Aside from the current Labor-led government’s mud-wrestling over its leadership, all opinion polls point to a landslide victory for the Tony Abbott-led Liberal Party at the

IF you haven’t seen them on the television or come across their interviews on the radio or in newspapers and magazines, then you’ve almost certainly seen their work as your eyes scan the climate change section in your local book store or library. They are the authors of books claiming

ANTI-WIND farm activists around the world have created a silent bogeyman they claim can cause everything from sickness and headaches to herpes, kidney damage and cancers. This “infrasound” exists at frequencies too low for the human ear to detect but is present almost everywhere from offices and roadsides to waves

THE climate science denial industry doesn’t like Penn State University’s Professor Michael Mann very much. Mann is the scientist behind the famous “hockey stick” graph that first appeared in the journal Nature in 1998. Mann and two other scientists Professor Raymond Bradley and Professor Malcolm Hughes had reconstructed temperatures in

MEMBERS of London’s famous gentlemen’s club Brooks’s have no doubt cooked-up a few bizarre plots, plans and wagers over the years as Britain’s gentry and ennobled upper class sipped on glasses of port in their smoking jackets. In 1785, for example, there was an agreement between two Lords to hand

BEN CUBBY, the environment editor at Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, admits he has an unusual problem – “how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?” The horse excretion in question is a report – CSIROh! – Climate of Deception or First Step to Freedom – sent to Cubby

PERHAPS somebody should write a pocket guide book with the title: “How to spot you’ve been suckered by a fake grassroots movement”. Once it’s written, these guide books could be distributed free of charge to crowds at anti-carbon tax rallies, US Tea Party marches and pretty much any gathering of a “movement”

A FEW weeks ago I wrote a story for DeSmogBlog looking at how Lord Christopher Monckton – a poster child of the climate science denialist movement – had agreed to launch a new Australian political party fronted by an anti-Islamist Creationist preacher. The party in question is called Rise Up

AUSTRALIA is baking in a heatwave which has broken all historical records for its geographical size and sheer number of extremes. For seven days straight, the country’s average maximum temperature has been above 39C (102F), beating a previous run of just four days of such temperatures set back in 1973.

PASTOR Daniel Nalliah, president of the fringe political party Rise Up Australia, has what you might politely describe as some fairly interesting views on matters of science, the climate, abortion and religious tolerance. In the pulpit-driven eyes of Melbourne’s Pastor Nalliah, humans didn’t appear on Earth until 6000 years ago,

IT’S the new must-have accessory for any self-respecting climate science denialist commentator in Australian newspapers – their very own “Australian Press Council” adjudication showing exactly how they stuffed up the facts and misled their readers on their stories. Whether they like it or not, serial climate science misinformers James Delingpole and

TWO leading groups representing thousands of scientists across Australia are asking for changes to the country’s Freedom of Information (FOI) laws to better protect climate change scientists from abuse and from deliberate attempts by climate sceptics to unfairly discredit them. FOI laws are being used to “target and attempt to

A CLIMATE sceptic blogger Alec Rawls has taken it upon himself to leak the current draft of an entire major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which is not due for publication until September next year. For those not au fait with the machinations of the IPCC (I mean, what do

FREEDOM of Information laws across the world were introduced as a way to open governments and their agencies to public and journalistic scrutiny and to extract the kind of information that tends not to make its way into press releases and government pamphlets. But seen through the eyes of some climate change scientists, it

A BRITISH MP revealed to be holding $400,000 worth of share options in an oil firm while sitting on an influential parliamentary climate change committee is also being paid $300 an hour to advise an Indian company building a coal fired power station, D…

SO a major United States university has decided to pull the plug on a research institute focussing on energy from gas after questions were raised over its ties to the industry.
Bloomberg reports that the “potential conflicts of interest”  had created …

LEVELS of the potent greenhouse gas methane have been recorded at more than three times their normal background levels at coal seam gas fields in Australia, raising questions about the true climate change impact of the booming industry.
The findings, w…

IT’S DIFFICULT to really know where to start in describing Lord Christopher Monckton, one of the planet’s most outspoken deniers of the risks of human-caused climate change. You could say he’s the leader of the Scotland branch of a fringe UK political party, for example. Or describe him as the