One’s immediate thought on looking at any of the multitude of photos of the devastation of Gaza is a profound sense of sorrow and grief at the capacity of humans to wreak such destruction and suffering. There is mind-numbing despair at the plight of children who have lost everything – their parents, other family members, Continue reading »
climate
As the temperature in Mecca reached 125.24° F. (51.8° C.) on Tuesday, word leaked out that nearly 600 pilgrims had died of heat stroke and 2,000 have been hospitalised for treatment. A virtual clinic treated more thousands remotely. Some 324 of the dead were Egyptians, while dozens were from Jordan. The season of the annual Continue reading »
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)(revival of the scholars) is Indonesia and the world’s largest Islamic organisation claiming almost 100 million members. If it digs coal it could become mega-rich. How dirty work marries with sending souls to paradise only Allah knows. President Joko ’Jokowi’ Widodo has four months left in office, enough time to sow division before Continue reading »
The terms of privatisation included an anti-competitive restriction on the development of a commercial-scale container terminal at Newcastle, primarily to boost the sale price of Port Botany. Everyone in Australia, and indeed beyond, has a stake in the successful transformation of Newcastle and the coal rich Hunter region of NSW. Why? Because in case you Continue reading »
The temperature is rising and the world is getting increasingly dangerous, even the rich bits. Former Tuvalu PM slams Australia’s climate policies. Rights of and around rivers. All of the last 12 months were the hottest on record The graph below shows the average global temperature increase above the pre-industrial level (1850-1900) for each month, Continue reading »
Bronwyn Kelly interviews prominent science writer and researcher Julian Cribb on key strategies that we will need for dealing with the significant environmental disasters we are facing in the age of climate change. Kelly and Cribb focus on strategies for transitioning our current unsustainable agriculture systems to systems that create an endless, renewable food supply Continue reading »
As the climate crisis accelerates and intensifies, it’s easy to despair about the possibility of any country taking the lead in ‘saving the planet’. And yet Xi Jinping at least says encouraging things. Should we take China seriously? A decade or so ago I wrote a paper with the, not entirely serious, title: can Australia Continue reading »
This was the haunting title of a recent speech by UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, at Chatham House in London. He speaks with knowledge, hoping to inspire faster action. The science is clear, as the latest IPCC report makes plain. We are now seeing what has been predicted. Simon speaks of “record-shattering heat Continue reading »
The Canberra Press Gallery is not a homogenous group although its members do seem to suffer from a fair amount of groupthink; preference for gotchas and speculation about what might happen next in politics; and heavy dependence on leaks and drops for copy. One part of it – the Murdoch part – subsumes this into Continue reading »