New South Wales
Environment Minister, Matt Kean, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation “We
are in the middle of the worst drought in living memory; this is the second
hottest year on record … Yesterday, smoke was causing some of the worst air
pollution in Sydney that we’ve ever seen – this is climate change”. Of course,
the people in the government who have previously been staunch climate change deniers
Rod Bower is the
priest at the Gosford Anglican Church, which is famous for the
thought-provoking statements posted on the noticeboard out the front of the
church. Some of them are: ‘Dear Christians, some people are gay. Get over it,
love God’; ‘When will they love their kids more than their guns’; ‘Our kids
climate future sold for 30 pieces of silver’; ‘Jesus had 2 dads and he turned
One of the best parts
of being a geoscientist is travelling to various parts of the country, often
far from cities and towns and walking up mountains (such as they are in
Australia) and along gullies looking for interesting rock outcrops and trying
to make sense of them and interpreting what they mean with regard to the
history of this continent and the planet. On one of these numerous trips, I was
Many teenagers can be dickheads relatively often,
and some eventually grow up to have rewarding careers in their chosen
profession or in business. Those that don’t grow up, clearly join the Liberal
Party. One of the incubators for such juveniles in the Liberal Party are the
Young Liberals, now called by some ‘the Dutton Youth’. In Queensland where the Coalition
parties have amalgamated, they are called the Young LNP, and it is the Gold
The
targets to which many nations signed up at the 2015 Paris Climate Change
meeting were designed to keep the rise in global average temperature to below 2°C, with a desire to keep it at
1.5°C above pre-industrial
levels1. Given the governments of many countries, especially
Australia, are attempting to fudge their targets, keeping the temperature
increase to the 2°C targeted
by Paris is looking like a forlorn hope.
Sean Kelly used to be
an advisor to prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, and he is now a
columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. In the latter, he has
written a piece1 which
explains in a much more pointed way something I tried to express earlier2,
after the publication of the paper by Ripple and others3. He also shows
that the sort of ‘balanced’ approach used by Emerson in his idiotic piece in