Dr Bill Johnston[i]
scientist@bomwatch.com.au
[i] Former NSW Department of Natural Resources research scientist and weather observer.
Main points
- The Australian Academy of Science (AAS) has abandoned empirical science in favour of advocacy, particularly in relation to climate change and net zero.
- The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world (AAS-2021) is a politicised document recycled from activists within its ranks.
- The policy and bureaucratic machinery surrounding climate and nature-positive legislation is highly centralised, unaccountable, and economically destructive.
- Historical climate variability is ignored in favour of a post-1950s “warming narrative”.
Net Zero is scientifically unjustified, economically irrational, democratically illegitimate and should be abandoned.
- Background
Entrusted under its Charter to promote and uphold rigorous scientific standards, the Australian Academy of Science seems to have forgotten what science is.
Drawn under the umbrella of CSIRO and universities by the Commonwealth and the Council of Australian Governments, the quality of Australia’s natural resources research effort has deteriorated markedly over recent decades. Decline is evidenced by an overreliance on complex models – often described simply as “The Science” – which lack robust empirical grounding. Instead of fostering unbiased inquiry based on rigorous research, the scientific process has been swayed by policy objectives, leading to questionable conclusions about the effect of climate change and warming in Australia.
In March 2021 the AAS released a report written by an independent “expert panel” chaired by WWF supporter, activist and Great Barrier Reef doomsayer Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (hereinafter AAS-2021). The report entitled “The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world” was reviewed by “expert reviewers” headed by Professor Ian Chubb, former Chief Scientist. Chubb was connected to Hoegh-Guldberg due to his Chairing the GBR Independent Expert Panel of the Reef 2050 Advisory Committee, of which Hoegh-Guldberg was a prominent member.
AAS-2021 claimed “Heatwaves, bushfires, storms and coastal flooding, have become more frequent and intense in recent times”. Also, that “risks are likely to escalate as global temperatures continue to rise” and that: “our capacity to respond becomes compromised as frequency increases”. Further, that the only way to contain the risks of global extinction was for Australia to reduce its already miniscule emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) to net zero by 2050.
- Review of AAS-2021 – motivation and impetus
Scientific progress fundamentally depends on the impartial testing of hypotheses supported by solid empirical evidence. In contrast, consensus indicates progress has stalled, possibly because inconvenient data, or alternative viewpoints are ignored or loudly brushed aside. For example, while low rainfall across eastern Australia from about 1996 to 2010 was stridently blamed on global warming, conditions were considerably worse, and the economic consequences more dire, during droughts that ended with the WW-II drought in 1947[i]. Focussing on post-1950s ‘warming’, reimagines the true history of Australia’s climate.
Established in 1998, the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) was the world’s first agency dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The AGO was also tasked with providing government-sanctioned information to the public. Former speechwriter for Senator Robert Hill, Environment Minister from March 1996 to November 2001, Guy Pearse, was also a paid AGO consultant. According to his Biography[ii] Pearse was also a lobbyist and worked for a time for then U.S. Vice President, climate-doomist Al Gore.
For his ANU thesis[iii] that essentially decried the influence of the National Farmers Federation and alleged fossil-fuel lobby groups on Howard-era greenhouse policy, Pearse neglected to mention or reach-out to the green-lobby, specifically WWF-strategist Mr Peter Cosier. While their paths seemingly never crossed, the former environmental planner for the Yass Shire Council, became senior policy adviser to Robert Hill at the same time Pearse was Hill’s speechwriter. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999) was likely strongly influenced or written by Cosier, WWF and its former President Robert Purves.
Interestingly, while Pearse invents conspiracy theories, writes one-sided opinion pieces and books admonishing industries that paved his way from childhood to speechwriter[iv], Cosier moved on. Having demolished state-based Murray-Darling Basin natural resources research agencies; and via the office of Minister for the Environment, eventually re-purposing the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO to reflect the policy demands of ‘green-science’, Cosier is now a board member of Accounting for Nature Ltd. — an outfit that through his convening the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists on behalf of Purves Environmental Fund, Cosier was instrumental in creating.
Accounting for Nature Ltd. is just one of the pillars of the Commonwealth’s Nature Positive Plan – a plan that will eventually plan Australian industries out of existence by creating another tax burden alongside the re-vamped carbon tax. Documents point to a bureaucratic nightmare[v], plans within plans, climate goals set by the ‘independent’ Climate Change Authority, regulations enforced by an ‘independent’ Environment Protection Authority, and an ‘independent’ Clean Energy Regulator – all unelected, hand-picked and unable to be sacked – an unnecessarily complex and costly imposition on farmers, businesses and taxpayers, but not accountable to the increasingly sidelined electorate. Government by process-creep and fiat[vi] unconscionably undermines Australia’s system of parliamentary democracy.
- The information marketplace tsunami
Since the 1990s funds provided by research councils and government were steered to support policy rather than explore ir advance contentions or contradictory issues. Concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, together with funding constraints, science’s capacity to provide fearless, balanced advice was severely compromised.
Taken together – funding and policy directives including AGO’s remit to only provide government-sanctioned information into the public square, led to a virtual tsunami of publications, new journals, PhD theses and studies in support of the warming narrative. In addition, many investigations and technical reports were funded directly by the AGO to support the governments carbon-accounting model — FullCAM.
Google Scholar estimated 25,100 papers related to “climate change Australia” were published between 1980 and 1990. The following three decades saw exponential growth: 142,000 (1991–2000), 231,000 (2001–2010), 541,000 (2011–2020), and 228,000 from 2021 to October 2025. Sea-level rise alone attracted some 15,000 references between 1990 and 2022[vii]. According to Gemini AI, press activity rose from 514 articles per year in the 1990s to over 80,000 per year in the 2010s.
Climate projections, initially simple brochures, have evolved into multi-volume, multi-tool digital products — all dependent on government funding[viii]. The sheer volume of agenda-messaging, risks overwhelming public understanding rather than clarifying uncertainties.
The Australian Academy of Science is trapped within this web: it accepts government largess, which binds it to unquestioningly support policy. COVID overreach[ix] is a poignant example of an instance where public debate was stifled.
- Climate warming: a wicked scientific problem
The supposed threat of global warming is wicked in the sense that it is complex, challenging and open-ended. If it exists, its causes and effects are interconnected and there is no way to know if or when the problem is solved. Evidence of climate warming is also impossible to separate from the chaotic behaviour of the natural world. Regardless of the precautionary principle outlined in AAS-2021, which itself lacks scientific boundaries, it is foolish to deplete treasure on a problem defined by moving goalposts and which is non-solvable in a conventional sense.
Overarching narratives of the United Nations and particularly the World Economic Forum of using COVID and disaster-marketing more broadly to achieve a “Great Reset” – essentially a coordinated policy shift without electoral mandate, should ring alarm bells throughout western democracies. WWF’s nature positive laws fall within that gambit.
Against the background of policy-driven science, moving goalposts, unachievable outcomes, and the desire by elites including the WEF and WWF to exert coercive control over sovereign states and the freedom of individual citizens, it is important that claims of imminent climatic, ecological or sociological catastrophe, highlighted in AAS-2021 be closely examined and adjudicated based on hard evidence, and from a scientific rather than an emotive perspective.
- Conclusions and a bridge to the 2022 critique
In the interest of open debate about the climate and its many confected horrors, it is an opportune time to put the evidence into the public domain. The unedited 2022 critique of AAS-2021, submitted to the Australian Academy of Science may be accessed here.
- The Academy ignored it, but the issues remain — and they deserve public scrutiny.
- Australia has always been the driest inhabited continent. Our landscapes are old, eroded and infertile and our fire-adapted vegetation has evolved to contend with highly seasonal and episodically changeable climates
- Historical records show natural disasters long predate contemporary climate change concerns; there is no evidence that frequency, extent, or intensity has or will change markedly in the future.
- Due to its reliance on cherry-picked, modelled, or homogenised data, AAS-2021 fails to present multiple lines of evidence that extreme events are increasing. No credible evidence exists that temperatures, evaporation, or rainfall are trending in ways that materially increase bushfire risk or imperil the Great Barrier Reef.
- The unfounded claim that action by governments will change or control the climate is irrational and absurd. Even if it were remotely likely, the prohibitive cost, and the consequences for employment, industry, commerce and sovereignty is not in Australia’s national interest.
In short, AAS-2021 is unbalanced, unscientific, and strongly biased. It lacks evidence of a catastrophic future, yet it interferes with politics by promoting narratives that are never likely to come to pass.
Dr Johnston’s detailed repudiation of AAS-2021, which the Academy ignored is available here [click link]
[i] Foley, J.C., 1957. Droughts in Australia. Review of records from earliest years of settlement to 1955. Bulletin No. 43, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, September 1957.
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Pearse
[iii] https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstreams/7f600956-ffb2-4106-9316-a7808c926568/download
[iv] Pearse, Guy (2007). High & Dry: John Howard, Climate Change and the Selling of Australia’s Future. Penguin (Australia).ISBN 978-0-670-07063-3.
[v] https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/nature-positive-plan.pdf
[vi] Funnell, W., 2001. Government by fiat: the retreat from responsibility. Unsw Press.
[vii] Communications Earth & Environment (2023) 4:257 https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00920-4 www.nature.com/commsenv
[viii] Whetton, P.H., Grose, M.R., and Hennessy, K.J., 2016. A short history of the future: Australian climate projections 1987–2015. Climate Services, 2-3, 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cliser.2016.06.001
[ix] https://www.paulramsayfoundation.org.au/news-resources/fault-lines-an-independent-review-into-australias-response-to-covid-19
