Geoff has written for publications as diverse as PC User and The Northern Star His weekly columns have been a source of humour and inspiration for tens of thousands of readers and his mailbox is always full.
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Apparently no Chinese ever uttered the curse, “May you live in interesting times.†Certainly, I have been cursed by descendants of the Central Kingdom, but mostly using English swear words involving money, or their daughters. Perhaps I misunderstood, I now have daughters of my own. Regardless, we do live in interesting times: Water, grain, fish Continue Reading →
We know when it’s getting cold down south. People with white skin start turning up on the doorstep.
Regular guests know the drill; they rent a car at the airport and get themselves to the front door. They’re happy sleeping under the dining room table.
Right now I’ve got a sister in law in the lounge room and my grey nomad parents in their campervan in the carport. My wife has moved out to the shed, but that’s another story.
The planet has a temperature. It is now 0.6 degrees above its pre-industrial temperature and rising. Unless we act to address this, the illness could be fatal, to us.
Until the second world war the average surface temperature of the planet was below 15.1degrees Celsius. For the last twenty years it has barely dropped below 15.3. It now appears to be rising at 0.1 degrees a decade. The rate of increase is accelerating. On current trends, it will crack 16 degrees before the end of the century. A century ago it was well below 15.
If you think about the weather, an increase of a degree here or there seems pretty minimal. The temperature across Australia varies from high thirties in the centre to low teens in Tasmania. The drier parts of the continent regularly experience a daily fluctuation of twenty degrees. It makes fractions of a degree appear minimal.
It does not intuitively make sense that a small increase in average surface temperature can have a dramatic effect on the planet.
Unless, that is, we think about the planet differently.
Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can
Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.
Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.
This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI Published: January 14, 2007 WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering. Continue Reading →
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/du_death_toll.html
The death toll from the highly toxic weapons component known as depleted
uranium (DU) has reached 11,000 soldiers and the growing scandal may be the reason behind Anthony Principi’s departure as secretary of the Veterans
Affairs Department.