Caroline Morrissey Communications

27/12/2025

Can't get your kids to practice their instrument? I've made an app for that! Check out JamTime on the App Store

27/12/2025

My new app encourages kids to practice their instrument while being a handy studio stool for teachers. Check it out!

26/10/2025

It's been a really hectic weekend

06/06/2023

📢 Attention North West QLD! Only a few more days to go until applications close for three amazing people to fill the below positions on the WIMARQ committee:

👉 President: the leader of this mighty branch and can represent the importance of the diversity and inclusion cause in the community and the regional mining industry of North West QLD.

👉 Secretary: the one who keeps an eye on the back end of the branch to ensure things run smoothly, keeping our beloved WIMARQ volunteers and members up to date with what we're up to and ensuring we are on task when things get busy.

👉 Sponsorship Liaison Officer: the social butterfly who can keep us in the good books with our sponsors and helps secure sponsorship for our events.

This is an exciting opportunity for three passionate individuals who want to make a difference in the diversity and inclusion cause and who want to step-up into leadership positions. You will continue to be coached and mentored by the outgoing committee. The only requirement is that you either work or live in North West QLD as part of the mining and resources sector.

We are taking applications until Friday 9th June. Please e-mail us at [email protected] to express your interest in the above positions. Please include a 150-200 word blurb about you, which position you would like to be considered for, and why you want to join the committee.

If you know anyone, feel free to recommend them! And any questions, please email us!

15/01/2023

The latest data shows that the Great Barrier Reef has record breaking amounts of coral. But, for a grandchild who had been indoctrinated by the school system, there is nothing like some pictures of wonderful coral to make them think.

Tony Ayling is a scientist who has been diving the Great Barrier Reef for about half a century. I have worked on a couple of projects with him over the last 30 years. There is little of the reef he has not seen. He is also the only person I know who was taken by a crocodile – he survived :) – while diving north of Cooktown. He has a story that Crocodile Dundee cannot match, and real scars to prove it.

But this is a wonderful video of parts of his recent trip to the reef. Watch it and feel less anxious about the reef.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjx46i9QQZw

It has become a tradition in January for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and other institutions to start to fret about whether the coral will get any hot-water bleaching. You can just about hear the doom music in their videos. But they said we had devastating bleaching in 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2022, and we have record coral cover this year – proving that very little coral died in those events relative to the remarkable regenerative capacity of the reef.
I am hoping, and strongly advise, that if there is some bleaching this year (there is always some bleaching) then the ‘scientists’ and managers will just remember that exaggeration damages the reputation of science, and the reef. It affects real people doing real jobs in North Queensland.

Please don’t do it in 2023

And enjoy Tony’s video.

01/12/2022

Food for thought

I wrote an article for The Weekend Australian about the latest “State of the Climate Report” which, as usual, seems to forget that the Reef has record high coral cover. It is a classic example of how the institutions refuse to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts the “story” they want to tell and proves they are no longer acting like scientists.

See below, or link at bottom. Also, Jennifer Marohasy has made an excellent post on her blog about this report.

Climate Report: Too bad to be true?
The BOM and CSIRO delivered their biennial dose of depression about the climate in their latest State of the Climate report. The climate has warmed by 1.5 degrees and there is barely a single benefit - it is all disaster.

It is often said, “if it is too good to be true, it probably is” and you are being conned. What about too bad to be true? Can a gently warming climate have no significant benefits at all?

The only marginally encouraging part of the report is about northern Australia. There might have been a slight reduction in cyclone numbers, and there has been a bit more rain in the last decades. Apart from that, the report reads like the Book of Exodus – one disaster after another. Only the frogs and boils are missing.

But it is significant that the period when Egyptians were building pyramids, which was hotter than today’s climate, is often called the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The word “optimum” was an indication that scientists working in the era before climate alarmism could see some advantage of a warmer climate.

A sure sign that the report tries too hard to find disaster, is when it discusses coral bleaching and the Great Barrier Reef. It stresses that there have been four bleaching events in the last six years, which it implies were devastating. But for some reason the report fails to mention that this year the reef recorded its highest amount of coral since records began in 1985. This proves that all the hype about the coral loss from bleaching was greatly exaggerated. But the report writers were obviously untroubled by the contradictory evidence. They ignored it.

And they also ignore the fact that corals grow about 15% faster for every degree temperature rise, and that almost all the corals on the reef also live in much warmer water near the equator. We should expect better coral, and it should extend further south. That is not too bad, is it?

Why doesn’t the report mention that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere improves the water utilisation efficiency of dryland plants, which occupy most of Australia, and that this has caused plants to thrive. According to NASA satellites there is a “greening” of Australia of at least 10%. Overall, the world has seen the area of green leaves expand by the equivalent of twice the area of the USA in just 35 years.

In a changing climate, there will be winners and losers, and it might be that the net effect is a major problem. But if the report writers will not even mention the good bits, how can we have any confidence in its findings. The latest report should ring alarm bells – but not just about climate. Is this an excellent tool of propaganda, or is it a scientific statement?

We should all worry about whether groupthink has taken hold of the BOM and CSIRO.

We should worry when the BOM say they have recently adjusted all the temperature records reducing the temperatures a century ago by up to a degree. Can we have any confidence they did this with a good scientific reason?

And we should worry about the BOM’s claims that the fire seasons are now much worse than in 1950. Why is all the information on huge bushfires before 1950 ignored – like the devastating 1851 Victorian bushfire and the 1939 fires. It is not like there is no data before 1950. Did they ignore that data for a good reason? Is this similar to the United Stated fire statistics which are often reported by authorities as having a major increase in fire acreage burnt since the early 60s, but fail to mention that there was almost ten times more acreage burnt in the “dust-Bowl” period in the 1930s.

In the next decades, Australian governments plan to spend hundreds of billions attempting to prevent climate change. Before we do that, maybe we could spend a few million doing an audit of BOM and CSIRO reports. Maybe we would find that adapting to a changing climate is by far the best way to proceed. We might even find that some of what we have been told is wrong.

Why will the conservative parties not commit to an audit. The fabulous data on the Great Barrier Reef is evidence enough that the science institutions have misled us, either deliberately or by incompetence. Who would argue against a bit of checking of the science, when the reef statistics prove scientists got something badly wrong. And the latest report is a sure sign that the BOM and CSIRO are drifting into political advocacy rather than science, observation, and objective prediction.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/chicken-little-propaganda-is-masquerading-as-science/news-story/5f61090be61904294facbb1eeb255270

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/bureau-of-meteorology-cools-the-past-warms-present/news-story/81c6a98a6fb1dc4229ea66c1cc512016
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-wildfires
See fig 16.1 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/bureau-of-meteorology-cools-the-past-warms-present/news-story/81c6a98a6fb1dc4229ea66c1cc512016

Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb7RqXHnGLk

07/09/2022

Congratulations well deserved . You’ve been an amazing role model for women and men in our industry for a very long time. A trail blazer with hands always stretched out to lift others up.

Congratulations to Lydia Gentle OAM from BHP for being named Dyno Nobel Exceptional Woman in Australian Resources.

This award recognises the exceptional achievement of a woman in the Australian resources sector in any occupation. Their professional success, leadership skills, resilience, methods of overcoming barriers, and seeking out and accepting new responsibilities and challenges.

It also recognises work to promote the industry’s reputation and standing in the community.

06/09/2022

Here's a breath of fresh air and something that's sorely needed, and not just for kids.

Placing our trust in facts is the best known panacea for misinformation. Audiences hold that panacea. The Information Age has delivered an avalanche of knowledge into people’s pockets: breaking news, fun facts about the world around us, the closest grocery store and the lyrics to your favorite kar...

12/08/2022

The University of Delaware has conducted an investigation into Danielle Dixson, who worked on the effect of carbon dioxide on reef fish while at James Cook University. It found she was guilty of “research misconduct” on fish behaviour and coral reefs. The investigation appears to have only focused on Dixson’s work after she left JCU. However, whistleblower Tim Clark and other international collaborators have found that much of her work at JCU could not be reproduced. All her JCU work appears to be - shall we say – highly questionable.

This is the second time a star JCU PhD graduate from the JCU Coral Reef Centre has moved to another university and rapidly been found to be guilty of misconduct. Oona Lonnstedt was infamously found guilty of data “fabrication” by Uppsala University in Sweden, and much of her work, which is closely associated with Dixson’s, has also been found to be highly questionable and extremely serious questions have been raised about her work at JCU.

Also, the latest coral cover statistics shows that the reef has never had more coral on it since AIMS surveys started (see my last posts) even though the JCU Coral Reef Centre has been claiming that vast amounts of coral died in 2016 from bleaching. They claimed devastating bleaching again in 2017, and again in 2020 and again in 2022. You have to start to wonder about much of JCU’s CRC work. Corals take 5-10 years to regrow – how could the GBR have lost so much coral and now be at record highs? Is there any quality assurance of their work?

It is time for JCU to accept that I might have been onto something when I stated, in 2017, that JCU has a serious quality assurance problem at its Coral Reef Centre. It is time to do an investigation and set past wrongs right. There is a new Vice Chancellor, so I hope he does the right thing. Otherwise, it smashes the reputation of all the excellent staff and students at the institution. JCU needs to do a thorough investigation of the Coral Reef Centre, and it could start by employing people from Uppsala and Delaware for the job. If JCU won’t do it, the Australian Research Council and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standard authority should.

Before I finish, I wish to say I have many friends at JCU who do first rate science and are great teachers. As a JCU-person from a first-year student in 1978 until I was fired as a professor in 2018, I was associated with the university for all but one year. My wife, my children, my brother, my sister, my in-laws and even my father did degrees there. So, it saddens me to see the damage that has been done to its reputation. But despite all that has happened, I still regularly advise people to send their children and grandchildren to JCU because their teaching is as good as any university in Australia.

As a final comment, it should be noted that Dixson denies the allegations against her and intends to appeal any finding of research misconduct.

References
Latest misconduct case: see
https://www.science.org/content/article/star-marine-ecologist-committed-misconduct-university-says
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/fish-and-foul
Clark, T.D., Raby, G.D., Roche, D.G., Binning, S.A., Speers-Roesch, B., Jutfelt, F. and Sundin, J. (2020). Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes. Nature, 577(7790), pp.370–375.

For the Lonnstedt case
https://www.science.org/content/article/does-ocean-acidification-alter-fish-behavior-fraud-allegations-create-sea-doubt
https://www.science.org/content/article/can-you-spot-duplicates-critics-say-these-photos-lionfish-point-fraud

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08321-2

12/08/2022

Awesome work New Hope Group !

11/08/2022