One of the great mysteries of the possible global impacts of climate change is the fate of the Gulf Stream more properly known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
A new Nature paper (2 March 2022) by Laura C. Jackson, Arne Biastoch, Martha W. Buckley, Damien F. Desbruyeres, Eleanor Frajka-Williams, Ben Moat and Jon Robson on the evolution of AMOC since 1980 throws more light on what might be happening with AMOC and why.
It would be easy to develop a history of recent Australian history around the theme of if only.
If only we had persevered with a carbon price and carbon trading system. If only we had cracked down on tax rorts such as negative gearing and dividend imputation schemes which benefitted the wealthy and/or pushed housing out of the reach of young people. If only we had embraced Indigenous reconciliation earlier and more meaningfully.
More than 30 years ago Umberto Eco wrote a book, Foucault’s Pendulum, about the creation of conspiracy theories by a group of Milanese book editors which embroils them in real conspiracies.
The editors, sick of looking at crackpot manuscripts, create more by randomly throwing hermetic manuscripts into a computer named Abulafia after the medieval Jewish cabbalist.
Works of art often have far deeper value than just their aesthetic appeal, their prices or their creator.
Over the centuries works of art have been destroyed by iconoclasts, burnt, stolen or damaged with graffiti.
But there is one work of art which will be characterised by a different fate – exemplifying much that is problematic about the City of Port Phillip (CoPP) and the way it is run. It is a relatively minor event but an immensely symbolic one.
Almost everyone will have ideas on what should be the priorities for the incoming Albanese Government.
While the manifesto was policy lite there were many significant institutional proposals such as rebuilding the Public Service and depoliticising it. The Thodey Review would be a good start but a better one would be just to get back to the traditional concept of a professional, apolitical, expert group capable of helping formulate policy and implementing it.
Much of the discussion about the emergence of the Teal Independents has focussed on the Morrison Government and its attitude to climate change and women as if this was the primary cause of the phenomenon.
Yet while it is immensely influential it is also significant that another source of their emergence, and possible success, stems from broader developments in western democracies.
A little while ago two neighbours sent me a short booklet on 10 big issues facing Australia in the future.
The booklet was edited by Michelle Grattan, published by The Conversation, and included contributions from various Australian academics and commentators.
Introducing the contributions Michelle Grattan said: “Never have we heard so much from our politicians and other political players. The professionalisation of politics with its armies of advisers and spinners and the 24 hour medias cycle combine to give us more political noise than ever before.
The MIT Green Future Index 2022 provides conclusive independent evidence of the Morrison Government’s climate policy failure.
The Index, now in its second edition, “ranks 76 nations and territories on their ability to develop a sustainable, low-carbon future. It measures the degree to which their economies are pivoting towards clean energy, industry, agriculture and society through investment in renewables, innovation and green policy”.
A new book on Gallipoli – The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How globalised trade led Britain to its worst defeat of the First World War by Nicholas A. Lambert – has some exceptional features
For instance, the index contains no listing for Australia, Anzacs, Keith Murdoch or anyone or anything else Australian. The bibliography is a dense list of archival sources with the only Australian ones being the Birdwood papers in the Australian War Memorial and Andrew Fisher’s in the National Library of Australia. Charles Bean gets an honourable mention in the text and Alan Moorehead is mentioned less enthusiastically.
It is useful to remind ourelves that there have always been independents standing for Parliament and in recent years a number of high profile ones have been successful – such as in the power sharing arrangements with the Gillard Government – in achieving policy change.
But the current situation is remarkably unusual – particularly in terms of political perceptions and commentary. Why is it so? as Julius Sumner Miller asked.