Coming back to a cold Canberra, chilled as much by lack of imagination as frost, it is time to reflect on my recent travels. The radio tells me the ACT Greens have expressed concern again, this time over the Stanhopeless government’s lack of attention to planning in the work on the road around City Hill. This will […]

Just how incompetent can a journalist be and still retain their job? I’ve yet to work it out, but it is no wonder that members of my profession are held in much the same regard as used car salesmen, based on the competence of their work. I’ve been listening to reports all afternoon that the […]

It played out more or less as predicted. Lots of hot air, lots of divisions along usual lines: rich vs poor, the US and China staring each other down, then pretending to be moving together. And a result that we are supposed to be content with, as it is ‘just a first step’. That would […]

You’ve got to give Kevin Hennessey writing in today’s Courier Mail an award for climate change chutzpah. He says: Without the peer-review system, publication of research findings would be arbitrary, and possibly influenced by personal, social or political agendas. Seriously? The hack of the HadCru computers demonstrates just how much peer-review has been hijacked by […]

Clive James has gone on the radio as a climate change sceptic, yet he is not a scientist. He is too clever by half, to my mind. And as we progress painfully to Copenhagen, the silly billies in the Liberal Party are also hell bent on not taking action. The ETS should fail, but because […]

Back in the early 60s my dad was chief engineer on ships in the Arctic Ocean servicing the Direct Early Warning (DEW) line which was a series of radars meant to give the US warning of ICBMs coming from Russia. This was very much Cold War time, although the chicken littles of the world should […]

Recently Kevin Rudd made a speech to the Lowy Institute where he labelled anyone who disputed the “scientific consensus” on global warming as driven by vested interests or anti-scientific. Where is the “consensus” to be found? Well if it is something that you can appeal to as a coherent body of thought, it can only […]

The Age has reported on Victorian cabinet documents that indicate they want to open the La Trobe Valley brown coal up for export. Apparently a company called Exergen would mine, dry and ship the coal to India, via a 150km undergroung pipe. Very high tech, very big project, very unwise. But they know that. The […]