Competition winner
Congratulations to Pauline Seddon, who has won her choice of an Apple Watch or Samsung Gear.
A grim future awaits
Roy Ramage writes: Re. “Temperature’s rising: acid rain of govt intervention leaves BOM high and dry” (Friday). All hope that humans will avoid the minimum 2% increase in global temperature must inevitably be abandoned. It is deeply disturbing that the well respected BOM staff, whose record of accuracy has improved year on year must now recoil from the truth. Tony Abbott and other neo-Liberal governments around the globe press on with business as usual despite overwhelming evidence that all is not well. This dreadful “human nature” guarantees that our continued industrial scale extraction of everything, will not just overshoot the 2% but almost certainly cruise past 4 degrees of warming.
Large parts of Australia remain in drought and our BOM staff have warned that the El Nino event is about to return. Our oceans are acidifying at an increasing rate and vast amounts of plastics are killing many forms of marine life. California has just instituted water restrictions as it is affected by its worst drought in memory. Bees are dying right across the US and massive floods are hitting parts of Southern America. The severity and cost of these events is staggering. We have been warned and continue to be cautioned by our own CSIRO experts who have global recognition of their many scientific achievements by all but Abbott and Co. That Abbott and his acolytes can cower our public servants into avoiding sound science shows that we are truly rooted.
Christians not standing idly by
Cameron Smith writes: Re. “On asylum seekers” (Friday). In response to John Gleeson’s call-out to church leaders to advocate for the plight of asylum seekers, I’d like to point him towards movements like Love Makes A Way, Common Grace, Welcome To Australia — members of which have engaged in social media campaigns, community organising and nonviolent civil disobedience in the form of prayer vigils and sit-ins in order to resist the violence of the government towards asylum seekers. There are also many other local initiatives, like Simple Love in Sydney’s inner-west, that have attempted to help those asylum seekers that are within the community with provisions and legal advice.
Is Abbott trolling us?
David Havyatt writes: Re. “Hockey bungles the message, but Abbott’s is a failure of conviction” (Friday). Bernard Keane is wrong when he says of Tony Abbott, “he appears (extraordinarily for a politician so frequently identified as an ideological warrior) to lack a core policy vision that informs his handling of the vicissitudes of public life.” He is right that Abbott doesn’t really stand for small government, even though he genuinely believes that government shouldn’t do anything people can do for themselves. What he simply believes is that all government is bad. But by definition that includes his own government. So every morning he wakes up to his eternal contradiction. His only saving grace has been that three Labor leaders in succession have been equally devoid of conviction.
Roy,
I know many keyboards are defective in not having the symbol for ‘degree’ temperature, but it’s best to just write out the word in full, rather than the wrong symbol %. Unless it’s an agreed workaround such as 10^24, standing for 10 to the power of 24.
But anyway. What I meant to write is that the ambition to limit global warming to 2 degrees isn’t benign. It’s just what is thought achievable if we get a move on. An average global temperature hides a lot of places where it’s considerably hotter or colder for short periods, with serious harm, despite the average over long period being barely different from the baseline.
That applies to both global warming and cooling. The eruption of Tambora in 1815, which caused the Year without a Summer in 1816, with snow in New England in June and widespread famine in eastern North America, Western Europe and China, was associated with average global cooling of less than 1 degree, because Summer cooling was offset by Winter warming, and diluted by the temperatures in unaffected regions.
It’s a mistake to think that 2 degrees of warming means that it will be 2 degrees warmer in all places and at all times. It won’t. Averages conceal rather than reveal.
What he simply believes is that all government is bad.
Tony Abbot is an authoritarian to his bones. He most certainly doesn’t think all Government is bad, just democratic Government (since people in groups have a nasty habit of voting for their best interests).