Tony Abbott's comments about women's virginity being a "gift" had barely had a chance to be read by friend and foe alike, than the media's attention had turned to another more pressing issue. Referred to by some politicians as the greatest moral challenge of our age, climate change was back on the front page once more.
The only constant in life is change, so some have been known to say. In January 2010, change was on everyone's lips. Why? Glaciergate. We shall come to that soon enough. First, in searching for answers as to why Armageddon was almost upon us, the findings were of exponential interest.
We live in the age of mammals, the Cenozoic Era. This has been divided into various epochs, the Paleocene, Eocene, and Oligocene Epochs, and the Miocene, Piliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs. Sixty-five million years ago, during the Paleocene Epoch, it was much warmer than it is today. Glaciers began forming in Antarctica only thirty-five million years ago, around when Goondwanaland split, with Australia and South Africa separating from Anatrctica.
Ten million years or so after that, grasslands began to form. As grasses began to develop, surplus grains were stockpiled, ending the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Homo erectus came on the scene under two million years ago.
Over the last 10,000 years there have been periods commonly referred to as 'neoglaciation,' 'climate optimum,' and 'Little Ice Age,' until today things appear to be warming up.
This summary comes from an article written by celebrated mathematical physicist John Baez entitled 'Temperature' (see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/).
A lot of what Baez says is prefaced with statements such as "subject for debate," "exaggerated importance," "questionable importance," and other such terms that make one question the validity and/or importance of global warming as a threat to humankind. Such caveats may simply be a form of insurance.
Even so, Baez's article gives a broad overview of the past sixty-five million years, leading him to conclude that temperatures have, on average, risen one degree celsius in the last 125 years. "But it's happening fast," he warns.
So fast, according to climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, that, when interviewed for Allianz (see http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/globalissues/energy_co2/) he said:
"we need to act decisively now. It is a race against time. As US President Obama has put it, 'delay is no longer an option.'"
Rahmstorf believes the greatest threat to actively countering alleged climate change is what he refers to as "climate change deniers." These deniers, in his opinion, are very rarely ever climate scientists but rather meteorologists, geologists, and, God forbid, laypeople, who, to paraphrase his comments, really have no idea what they are talking about. "Not familiar with the data" are the words he uses.
The data. Now it's understandable that the average layperson could be excused for questioning the data when confronted, as the writer was, at lunch prior to Christmas '09, with what one could generously describe as 'advertising' from www.suprememastertv.com. In a food court near work, having picked up lunch from a nearby deli and having taken a seat at a table nearby, a lunch companion read aloud text from the 'advertising' material on the table. It read:
"...if the ice all melts, if the poles all melt away, and then if the sea is warm, then the gas might be released from the ocean, and we might be poisoned."
It was a quote taken from Supreme Master Ching Hai, allegedly a "world renowned humanitarian, artist and spiritual teacher, announcing such dangers at a Paris Seminar on Christmas Day 2007."
The next column on the 'advertising' material began with a warning that read "United Nations Report - Meat Eating is a Major Cause of Global Warming...Be Veg! Go Green! Save The Planet."
The "data" was the very same as that that had apparently been 'dumped' by the University of East Anglia (UEA). As a result, anyone could be forgiven for being a little wary as to the validity of the data on which such warming concerns were formulated.
Times Online said that "scientists at the University of East Anglia" had admitted to "throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based."
Welcome to 'Climategate'.
'Climategate' seemed to be only the beginning. Come 2010 and 'Glaciergate' had arrived. Some sceptics had been suspicious for some time of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but now such suspicions appeared to be 'bearing fruit.' Were the Himalayan Glaciers really likely to melt by 2035, as the IPCC had declared in a 2007 report? It was not until 2010 that it was found and then commonly reported that the 2035 timeframe came from a report in New Scientist Magazine in the 1990's. The interviewee who provided the 'news' admitted to its speculative content.
And then came 'Disastergate.' From reading the papers, it appeared it was possible climate change may not be at the centre of the increasing incidence and damage caused by natural disasters after all. And forty percent of the Amazon Rainforest may not be wiped out by global warming, as was first claimed by the IPCC. The IPCC, Friends of the Earth, The World Wildlife Fund for Nature, and others, had always been thought to have the best interests of laypersons at heart. Could it be that they actually had an agenda of their own, a viewpoint that was more political than factual? Surely this could not be true - could it?
Throughout all this, the feral camels in Australia's desert were laughing. They had just been told that they would be exonerated by climate scientists because they were not 'domesticated.' Yes, even though feral camels emit more carbon than all other carbon-emitting animals except for cattle and buffalo, they were free and clear as their carbon was not included under the Kyoto Protocol.
The feral camels were having a party in the desert. But they had better be careful not to celebrate too soon. It was opposition policy to cull the camels Kyoto cleared. One thing was for sure - Australia's feral camels, whilst not being able to vote, would nonetheless be watching the result of the upcoming federal election with interest.
In a speech over the weekend prior to the opening of the first parliamentary session for the year, Tony Abbott had been quoted in The Weekend Australian on January 30-31 describing the existing federal government as "perhaps the most overhyped political outfit in Australian history." Meanwhile Labor politicians were trying to ram home to the public their belief Abbott was lecturing morality to the voters. Politics was getting personal again. The attacks were heating up, along with the climate.
Forty-eight hours later and the first Newspoll of the parliamentary session was on the front page of the day's paper and in the middle of many voters' breakfast tables that morning. Jaws dropped! It showed Tony Abbott and the Coalition in front of Labor on primary votes, forty-one percent to forty percent. The Opposition were narrowing the gap on two-party preferred as well, only four percent behind.
Abbott would attribute the result to the government's ability to take the voters for granted, and, of course, to their "great big new tax on everything," the ETS.
At least it seemed that, in the lead up to an election that would become a spin doctor's delight, the voters were faced with a credible choice...at last.
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