Unless you were living under a rock, or in hospital in an induced coma, you would know that:
Richmond has swept to victory in the AFL grand final, extinguishing GWS hopes of glory with a dominant 89-point win at the MCG for the club’s 12th flag.
GWS was hoping to complete a fairytale finals turnaround to win the flag from sixth but after the Giants kicked the first goal of the day, they then conceded the next 11.
Out-tackled, out-performed, out-scored — it was a dirty day for the Giants, as a terrific Tigers outfit made it two flags in three years with a 17.12 (114) to 3.7 (25) victory.
This is the final version of a post first published on Thursday 26 September. This version contains additional material, and a considerable amount of the earlier version has been pruned.
I hope to do a specific post on the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. Meanwhile we have a closing media release from the summit. While it tells us that “77 countries committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, [and] while 70 countries announced they will either boost their national action plans by 2020 or have started the process of doing so”, none of the large emitters were included. Matt McDonald, Associate Professor of International Relations at the The University of Queensland, gives a neat summary with lots of links in Highly touted UN climate summit failed to deliver – and Scott Morrison failed to show up.
One success of the Summit was Greta Thunberg’s amazing speech:
I loved learning German at university through it’s poets and other great writers. One reason I never mastered colloquial German was it’s practice of borrowing foreign words and then rendering them in a way that just isn’t true to the Sprachgefühl (intuitive feeling for the natural idiom of a language. So we have:
Our country is burning up and the powers-that-be refuse to help, so it’s time to show them we’ve had enough (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
In 1988 James Hansen addressed the US Senate warning of the danger of climate change. Ostensibly the world took notice in the Earth Summit at Rio and the establishment of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) which meets in the Conference of Parties for two weeks in early December each year. It gave us the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. However, as I indicated in Four graphs that matter in the climate emergency: bonus edition, the effect on rising CO2 emissions is invisible:
This is an updated version earlier post, slightly shorter, where I have deleted some material in favour of new material, especially towards the end, and sharpening some points along the way.
When I was young, we wore clothes until the wore out. I had an elder brother, and got to wear hand-me-downs.
This all changed, possibly in the 1970s and 1980s. Now we have the phenomenon of single-use clothing, ironically often T-shirts worn by people crusading to save the planet. Richard di Natale is, I think, the Australian politician most often seen in T-shirts. During the last election he often looked like this:
To be honest, I’ve been knocked a bit askew by the David Spratt’s question At 4°C of warming, would a billion people survive? The answer according to some respected scientists is, in brief, probably not, something less than a billion, and 4°C seems to be where we are heading.
That would mean on average more than a million deaths from global warming each week for the next 90 years. Continue reading Weekly salon 1/9→
