Climate Change

Jun 23 2021

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Some concluding thoughts about climate change

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Environment, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Research, Society | 349 Comments

Climate change got me into establishing and maintaining a website, so it’s fitting that I farewell the website (almost) with a comment about this vexed issue. As with defence, nothing much has changed since I first got interested in the issue twenty years ago. Very briefly, I was writing a book about Australia twenty years from now (= then = 2002), and it needed a chapter on ‘the environment’. That took me to global warming, and on the advice of a friend or two, including Ian Castles, the former Australian Statistician, I ploughed through the WGI paper of the Third…

May 26 2021

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The choice facing Labor

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Environment, History, Media, Politics, Society | 117 Comments

The Australian Labor Party is in something of a mess, a state exemplified by its defeat in the NSW Upper Hunter by-election. Upper Hunter has been Labor and Country party and National. It all depends on where the boundaries are drawn. Some of it is pastoral, and some of it is mining. Labor picked a miner as its candidate, but its vote plummeted, from 28 per cent to 22 per cent. Let’s think about this. Labor at 22 per cent, and a fall from 28 per cent? Who got the rest? The National candidate won a bit over 31 per…

May 05 2021

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The perfect essay on climate change

By Don Aitkin | Books, Climate Change, Economy, Environment, History, Politics, Religion, Research | 444 Comments

Every now and then I come across someone else’s work that is so good I want everyone to read it. This essay, by Richard Lindzen and William Happer, is one such. They are supremely eminent scientists, and their current status is given at the end. Yes, they don’t give references, but then neither do most alarmist speakers, like Steffen, Karoly, Mann and so on. They are speaking from a position of intellectual eminence. Like a few others who are outspoken in their sceptical cause, they are retired. No deans are complaining to the university president about these two. So read…

Apr 28 2021

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Voting and talking

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Environment, Humour, Media, Politics, Research | 141 Comments

The Canadian humourist Rick Mercer has had a series called ‘Talking to Americans’, and in one interview he asks a group of women what they think about the Russian proposal to bomb Chechnya and Saskatchewan. ‘Should they bomb both, or only one?’ There is a pause and then one of the women says, ‘They should bomb both.’ The others then agreed. Now his program is designed to make Canadians laugh, in this case at the sheer ignorance of those below the border. There’s a moral in it as well. People will feel that they ought to have an answer, especially…

Apr 22 2021

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Climate catastrophes are still twenty years away

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, History, Media, Politics | 100 Comments

Prince Philip was, among other things, a sceptic about the horrors of climate change, which made him a useful foil to his son, who is a renowned alarmist. The media do not seem to have mentioned the Duke’s attitudes to this supposed modern apocalypse, but Prince Charles is quite often quoted in his warnings to us about how little time we have left. And that contrast between father and son coincided with my coming across a list of 79 predictions, most of which have not come to pass, and I thought it might be useful to look at them, their qualities…

Mar 24 2021

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How feasible are these 2050 targets?

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Environment, Politics, Society | 286 Comments

The year 2050 is the target moment for those who want an end to greenhouse gas emissions, and a lot of countries have signed up to it. Ours hasn’t yet, thank goodness. The target year is a long way away, and nearly all of those who have signed up to it won’t be alive then, I should think. I shan’t be there — I’d be 113 if I were, and that is rather unlikely, to say the least. How is the process of transition going to work? I haven’t seen any detailed plans for implementation. I doubt there are any,…

Feb 17 2021

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Back to energy, again

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Environment, Politics, Research, Society | 387 Comments

Driving in the bush with my son on Saturday I saw some gigantic wind turbines on top of a small range, and he told me there was a line of them stretching up to Crookwell, quite a way away. That got us talking about the fantasy of wind power, while later the talk took me to another excellent Judy Curry piece, the origin of which I have begun to read. Since it is nearly 350 pp long I will give readers bits of the Extensive Summary instead. Written by two members of the European Parliament, Katinka Brouwer and Dr Lucas Bergkamp,…

Feb 10 2021

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What do popular votes mean in the USA?

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Politics, Society | 117 Comments

In this essay I want to return to the US Presidential election, not because I think there was anything suss in the outcome, though there might have been (see Time magazine’s expose here), but to point out some singular features of the result, and what they might mean both in the USA and here. First, the numbers. No one in American history has won more votes than Donald Trump did last November, save for Joe Biden, who won over 81 million popular votes, just over 51 per cent of the votes cast. Donald Trump won 74 million, or not quite 47…

Feb 03 2021

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The Right Talk

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Environment, Media, Politics, Society | 25 Comments

There I was at the National Press Club, to hear the new Prime Minister. Some years have passed since I was last there. Often the take-home message has been given to the media, so you know what the speech is all about. But not this time. I had my recorder on, and I can tell you that this is exactly what he said. Friends, he said, I have heard a lot of people speak in this renowned venue, and most of them look happily to the future, because of what they and their government, or their corporation, are going to…

Jan 20 2021

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The problem of passionate demands

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Education, Health, Other, Politics | 105 Comments

Over the past few weeks I have been having drives and talks with my elder son, whose interest are like mine, though he is more interested in the philosophical aspects of politics than its day-to-day jousting. What follows comes from one of these talks we have had while driving through back roads in the bush, which we both enjoy. There is an incompatibility in all human societies in terms of what we want from our society and its government. We want X, but don’t always realise that it almost certainly involves Y, which we don’t want. Take our treatment of…