Critical Times

by Renfrey Clarke

Climate change deniers, conservative politicians and right-wing newspaper columnists were all but incontinent with delight. Deluging the internet in mid-November were thousands of documents and private emails that had been exchanged over more than a decade by prominent climate scientists. The materials were posted anonymously after hackers penetrated the server of one of Britain’s main climate change research centres, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

Source: Western Adelaide Residents’ Association

Editorial Note: This article came to our attention after the event. Our apologies. Nevertheless it is still worth reproducing.

Source: The Guardian

by Peter Mac

The Rudd government has so far failed to take advantage of a golden opportunity to acquire the vast southern Queensland irrigation property, Cubbie Station. The huge consumption of water in this and other irrigation properties in the St George area has drastically reduced water flows into the upper Murray River for years, just when flows have been shrinking because of climate change.

Cubbie Station’s dams, which have the greatest capacity of any irrigation property in Australia, can hold 530 billion litres, almost as much as Sydney Harbour.

MEDIA RELEASE
Climate Emergency Action Network SA (CLEAN SA)

Monday, 9 November 2009 – For Immediate Release

“A war of attrition against the people of Adelaide”, is the way that one local climate action group today described the expected record heatwave for the city, saying that the continuous heat should be an urgent wake up call to all politicians about the need for urgent action on climate change.

“This November heatwave is likely to cause more deaths among the elderly and the isolated, like the 30 pensioners who died of heat-related causes during the heatwave earlier this year,” John Rice, spokesperson for CLEAN SA, the Climate Emergency Action Network, said today.

“Adelaide’s unprecedented November heatwave is classic climate-change weather.

Source: International League of Peoples’ Struggles

By Prof. JOSE MARIA SISON
Chairperson, ILPS International Coordinating Committee

Since the fall of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989, the world capitalist system has sunk deeper into crisis. It is now undergoing its most severe crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with some commentators calling the present crisis “the Greater Depression” in terms of its effects on the jobs and livelihood of the workers and peoples of the world.

by Humphrey McQueen

The great Tree of Life –The tangled bank – Publishing – Anthropocentrisms – Kew Gardens – Voyaging – In Australia – Darwin’s botanical ignorance – Darwin learns botany – the Hookers – ‘The Origin of Species’ – Artificial and Natural Selections –Paleo-botany – Super-continents or migration? – Orchidiae – – Brown and Sprengel – Cross-fertilisation – The necessity of sex – Sexual selection – The utility of beauty – Colour vision – Marketing Memes – ‘fatal to my theory’: Kelvin and Jenkin – Darwin runs out of time – Darwin runs faster – Pangenesis – ‘Let us imagine’ – Mendel – Life, the unfinished experiment

Despite Charles Darwin’s confessing in 1843 to an ‘entire ignorance of Botany’, he had, before his death in 1882, inherited the laurel of Jupiter Botanicus. On the centenary of The Origin of Species in 1959, population geneticist J. B.

Source: The Guardian
by Bob Briton

The questions were bound to be asked at some stage. If climate change is causing polar ice caps to melt and low-lying island nations are already starting to disappear, how long can it be before coastal settlements in Australia come under threat from rising sea levels and extreme weather events? How ready is Australia to deal with this unfolding challenge? What about the planning and insurance issues?

Should affected property owners be compensated, relocated or barricaded against the swelling tides? Some deep official thinking has been going on but the results so far are not comforting for the 80 percent of Australians who live in our coastal zones.

A bi-partisan House of Representatives committee has spent the past 18 months looking at these and other climate change-related questions.

Noted historian Humphrey McQueen (above) and South Australian State Secretary of the CFMEU Martin O’Malley were interviewed about issues in the construction industry by Catherine Zengerer of SA Unions for the Your Rights at Night broadcast on Radio Adelaide 101.5.

Here is a link to the first of several podcasts on the topic:

http://houndbite.

by Renfrey Clarke

If the Weekend Australian devotes a whole broadsheet page to a proposed solution to global warming, the editors must want to inform the public on how best to combat climate change. Right?

Hardly. If the Weekend Australian cared about our climate, it wouldn’t draw its text from one of the strangest travesties of climate science ever to issue from a printing press.