Who knew thousands of unpaid scientists are rising in protest against name-calling bullies and rent-seekers?
Jo Nova is one. She’s a libertarian, prize-winning science grad and blogger and her site gets over 2 million hits a year. The former Green still wants to save the world, but now with logic, reason and the scientific method (…a perfectly good civilization is going to waste.)
Andrew Bolt described her writing as “outstanding”, and called one piece “a magnificant polemic.” She’s been quoted by James Delingpole, Christopher Booker, and Mark Steyn. She’s been blamed for the collapse of the ETS and named in the Australian Parliament. The Oxfam report on ClimateGate news listed her blog influence as being equal to NASA. The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne listed Jo Nova as the balancing counterpoint to the combined scientific weight of The UN and government departments. She must be doing something right.
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Her blog won Best Australian and New Zealand Blog in the 2012 Bloggies Awards. Nearly 430,000 people visited it in 2012.
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Dismayed at the way science was being exploited for financial gain, status and power, in 2008 she wrote The Skeptics Handbook pro bono. The booklet took off with over 220,000 copies published worldwide. It was so popular that volunteers translated it into 15 languages: French, German (twice), Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, Danish, Czech, Portuguese, Italian, Balkan, Spanish, Lao and Thai. Her paper Climate Money was the first to document the unprecedented rise of volunteer auditors and independent scientists and the massive one-sided way government funding worked to distort science: supporters of the man-made climate catastrophe had been paid 3,500 times as much as skeptics, yet the skeptics were called the shills. She was also the first to spotlight the influential role of banks and financial houses who had a major stake in carbon trading.
She has presented speeches across Australia, in New York and Washington.
A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology, Jo has also hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, and has done over 200 radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC. She was formerly an associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU and is based in Perth, Western Australia.
She is married to Dr David Evans, the Stanford PhD in fourier analysis, former leading carbon modeler for the Australian Greenhouse Office. They support their own research and writing.
The Blog
Jo Nova was one of the four heretics mentioned by Matt Ridley in his summation of the global effort to separate science from pseudoscience.
“The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics”.
Jo Nova has been mentioned or referenced by The Australian [World wide web of doubt Hot and bothered , Let's have a debate, Aunty] , Forbes, The Spectator, Mark Steyn, Andrew Bolt [here and here], ABC (the Drum1, Drum2), The Science and Public Policy Institute, The Hawaii Reporter, James Delingpole of The Telegraph (and here and here too), Christopher Booker, and The Examiner, The West Australian. Jo did a five part debate with Dr Andrew Glikson, first through Quadrant Online, then at her own blog. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald tried to disparage her with an ad hominem. So did Clive Hamilton. Of course, Joanne has her own DeSmog Blog page.
Jo has been interviewed on The John Batchelor Show (NY) [1] [2], the Corbett Report and with Michael Smith on 4BC and on Global Cooling Radio.
A varied career
Jo Nova is the stage name of Joanne Codling. She took up the name in 1998 for privacy reasons when she started work with Channel Nine as the host of a childrens TV series. Professionally, everything since then was done as Joanne Nova — the book, the TV. speaking and radio programs, and the joannenova.com.au website, which was registered way back around the year 2000.
Joanne spent five years touring Australia with Shell Questacon Science Circus. For her first full time job, she managed the half million dollar exhibition with a team of twelve. As an associate lecturer at ANU Joanne helped to develop the Graduate Diploma in Science Communication in its earliest years. Her favourite hands-on science experiments were published as a book in 2003.
Since 2008 Joanne has focused on the science of monetary systems, financial history, the gold market, and has also become heavily involved in communicating the science of carbon’s role in “Climate Change”. Joanne attended the UNFCCC in Bali Dec 07, has spoken in New York at the International Climate Change Conference, and to Senate staffers in Washington DC, as well as to Australian leaders of business and banking at Consilium, for the Centre for Independent Studies.
Previously Joanne delivered keynote speeches at conferences on the latest advances in science for professional groups like researchers, medical specialists, accountants, engineers, and teachers. Her favourite topics include discussing the medical revolution and how we may all outlive our superannuation.
Joanne has also managed programs bringing hands-on science to street kids in Melbourne and remote Aboriginal communities as well as earning money as a cartoonist, graphic designer and illustrator. Her interests span health, money, history, and climate science, to anthropology, Austrian economics, and groupthink.
Joanne Nova lives in Perth, Australia. She welcomes comments (but not spam) email: joanne AT joannenova.com.au (replace the ‘AT’ with’@’ to foil nasty agents.) She received no funding for the first Skeptics Handbook or to create this site. Donations help to cover costs, and made the second Handbook possible in late 2009. She and her husband are self employed.
Her phone number is unlisted, she does not live in Bateman or Palmyra. (Please don’t phone them!).
More details about her speaking, TV, radio work and qualifications here.
[...] “Professional Speaker” turned climate expert Nova rehashes two of the more common skeptic talking points, that: the world is no longer warming and the Vostok ice core record proves that rising CO2 emissions are not… [...]
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[...] written not by a practicing researcher of course, but by a woman named Jo Nova whose past vocations included hosting of children’s program in Australia and touring Australia with a “science [...]
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[...] Joanne Nova writes – [...]
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[...] Joanne Nova writes – [...]
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[...] berömde henne för att vara en grävande journalist som lever upp till sitt ethos som journalist. Joanne Nova kallar sig för ”vetenskapskommunikatör”, vilket kanske är ett något vidare begrepp än [...]
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Global warming is not due to greenhouse gases, its due tothe earth’s orbit around the sun destabilizing, you have been lied too. Please read my blog at: orbital-decay1.blogspot.com..
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Dear JoNova,
The Australian Government/DFAT government are looking to sell us out to the overseas corporations once and for all by signing up with this Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement – Free Trade.
Are you able to contact all your other contacts/links because there is a deadline for Submissions mid July 2012.
Big Business mainly overseas entities operating in Australia have put in submissions approving this agreement but its all to the detriment of Australian Sovereignty and its people. Basically it surrenders powers to large corporations and gives them more power over our land including resources etc. Please look into it because they are having a meeting in August in Sydney however there is a deadline this month for submissions. Because its so secret most people are not aware of it and my submission will have no weight.
What can we do to contest this?
http://www.dfat.gov.au/fta/tpp/index.html#news
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/leaks-indicate-tpp-may-diminish-australian-sovereignty/
http://www.dfat.gov.au/fta/tpp/index.html#news
Regards,
Maggie
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Hi, enjoy your site which I am just getting to know better (I’m a regular at BH and CA and WUWT).
I know you have bigger fish to fry with the carbon tax etc. but if you know of any journalists or bloggers who might be interested, I think there seem to be some bizarre statements and behaviors associated with David Karoly, the Australian Book Review, and also of course the larger context of the dubious Gergis et al (2012) paper. For just the most recent examples:
David Karoly still smearing Steve McIntyre
—
Jo
Thanks for the tip
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[...] I’m an “Australian journalist” but if he’d done ten seconds of research and read the “About” page on my site, he’d have seen that I’m not and have never been a journalist. It’s [...]
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Hi, your statement that you would not like to see a good civilization go to waste rings true for me also. I have spent the good part of seven years researching to find out why we are in the mess we are in. Even though conditions are improving in the human world we are still in grave danger of going down the same path of many civlizations before us. I tried to find the source of our madness and ending up putting it into a book form. The Trinity Matrix 2012 (at http://www.scribd.com)is an attempt to identify ‘the brain of the beast’, i feel that if enough people see the pattern mentioned in the book then human awareness of self and our universe will be able to improve and sustain our civilization. Please have a read, it is free of cost.
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Great blog Jo, and your work on debunking climate pseudo-science is amongst the best.
Here’s one for you to explore then, I’m calling it “minushalfgate”
This must yet be the simplest and easiest debunk of the greenhouse gas / back-radiation effect hypothesis there is…
I use arbitrary units and scales for illustrative purposes.
The greenhouse gas / back radiation effect, which is at the core of the global warming scam, says that upwelling heat energy from the surface is absorbed and some re-radiated back to the surface, further warming it.
This hypothesis is the greatest and simplest maths error the world has ever known.
This is it…
- When 1 unit of energy is lost from the surface, its temperature drops by 1 unit.
- CO2 absorbs and retransmits a portion back to the surface, the ‘back radiation’.
- As the re-radiated energy is in random, i.e. all directions, a maximum of 0.5 units can be downward, i.e. back radiated. Let’s call that 0.x.
- The hypothesis sums these two, 1 + 0.x = 1.x, i.e. >1 and therefore warming.
This is completely WRONG!
The calculation should be -1 + 0.x =
<1, i.e. cooling. The lost unit MUST be counted as -1 (minus 1) and not +1 (plus 1).This corrected calculation also does not make any assumption about the atmospheric composition, and doesn’t need to. Even if the atmosphere were 100% CO2, the back radiation could not be
>0.5, so even 100% CO2 could not heat the surface!The maths error is to assume the surface still has that unit of energy, where it has lost it. The maths error creates this unit of energy out of nothing, which is impossible.
This means that the hypothesis debunks itself, so other correct hypothesis needed.
This is why I called it:- minushalfgate
[Did you forget where that original 1 unit comes from and continues to come from during daylight hours? mod oggi]
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[Apologies: penultimate paragraph should read "This means that the hypothesis debunks itself, so NO other correct hypothesis is needed"]
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Could you indicate the exact link of Prof Parncutts statement (death penalty for deniers)
Kind regards
erner
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Did Oz change its brush cutting policy? I didn’t know you guys were having fires again.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-04/wildfires-hit-australia-amid-worst-heatwave-in-decade.html
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I read in ACIM that to totaly understand something you must understand the totality.
Many influences affect the earths surface temperature and much of the disagreement on the subject is because there are so many influences and it is all too easy to overlook one or more of them.
I have a question for a scientist who can answer me this; If the weight of the atmosphere increased by 0.15% how much would the avg temp at the surface increase? I haven’t heard this discussed but if man is increasing the weight of the atmosphere then AGW is real even if the green house effect is totally illusionary.
steve bunn, perth WA 26/1/2013
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[...] JoNova runs the hugely popular award winning Skeptical Science blog JoNova in Australia, with a World wide readership. She is the author of The Skeptics Handbook, now translated into 16 languages. [...]
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