Shelley once claimed that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind” a proposition with which my fellow English graduate Nathan Rees might agree. As someone who retired from writing poetry after producing a very modest published output, it’s an idea to which I’m not unsympathetic. Belief in the manifest rightness of your particular profession running […]

Apparently the energy crisis is shifting Americans’ attitudes to global warming – they’re less worried. Hard to tell from the NBC report exactly what this means, although I gather 58 percent of them are still worried about the direction in which the environment is heading. Judging from the picture on the right, maybe they never […]

Yesterday, Jennifer Marohasy posted a blog asking for peer reviewed scientific papers that: “1. examine the causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and warming, and 2. quantify the extent of the warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide. This would seem like a brave call, but Jennifer’s been having some success lately. Her suggestion thatf the Coorong […]

Brendan Nelson is right that Australia shouldn’t adopt an emissions trading scheme unless China and India do, but it is a brave political move. He has to sell a proposition from opposition that John Howard couldn’t sell from government. The proposition is quite simple. With less than 2% of world emissions, Australia can do little […]

Perhaps my tree-hugging and soppy yearning for simpler times with fewer threats isn’t striking the right chord. It may be more useful to present facts, research, documentation and links to the good, the bad, and the scary environmental news. As a true Libran (some of you may be agnostic as to whether God exists, I […]

One of the most commonplace arguments in support of action on global warming is a variant on Pascal’s wager. Pascal’s wager is the proposition that one ought to believe in God, because the detriment in not believing is so immeasurably larger than the cost of believing that one would be foolish not to take out […]

If Peter Combe could turn Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, that founding myth of the Australian conservation movement (perhaps second only to The Magic Pudding) into an opera, why shouldn’t the Italians turn An Inconvenient Truth, the founding myth of Warming Hysteria, into one? Which is apparently what they are doing. It may or may not be […]

There is a fundamental problem with most carbon-trading schemes. They are fairly good at coping with emissions (at least in theory), but not so good at coping with natural abatement. One way of looking at the Greenhouse issue is to argue about whether we have an emissions problem or not. Another way of looking at […]

You will see this phrase again, as it is the name of a hot new movie about environmental catastrophe. This doco formerly named ‘Crude’ features Pete Postlethwaite playing a journo looking back from some decades in the future, wondering why we didn’t act when we could. You can find out more at their website: www.ageofstupid.net […]

I have a bet with a close friend that oil will be more expensive in around 18 years time than it was 2 years ago (it’s a two year old bet). My money’s looking pretty safe at the moment. Not that I necessarily think that oil prices are going to stay as high as they […]