But here’s the most disturbing thing. Denialists – led by powerful politicians and business leaders – have won the day. By clouding the debate – by badgering and bullying credible scientists and those who respect them – they have prevented any meaningful action on slowing the rate of global warming. If it wasn’t so serious you could smile at the irony. Those people who hate change more than anything else, those people who deal with the horrifying prospect of global warming by pretending it doesn’t exist, have successfully prevented efforts to stop one of the greatest disruptions confronting humanity. Those people. They’ve certainly earned their place in the hell to come.
As I mentioned a few days ago, the Liberal Party in New South Wales now seems a bit confused about climate change, with the state Environment Minister, Matt Kean, clearly…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“Accepting the science” no longer means believing in climate change, it means accepting that catastrophic events are on their way unless we act pretty much immediately. We can ignore this if we like, go on deluding ourselves that politics can be discussed the way it used to be. But if we do, there will be consequences, and nobody will be able to protect us from them.
I went to a geoscience conference a while ago, which Ian Plimer, the darling of the climate change deniers, also attended. While some people were quite happy to be seen…