Musings, mutterings and bright lights

Lulu has been with us since shortly after the Sydney Olympics, or getting into the 20 th year now, after our previous cat acted like a dog with a passing car winning the joust. Vale Joshua. After a short bereavement period, a new kitten was welcomed to our household; enter Lulu putting us under new management. Presently she’s stone deaf, shits all over the place, whines and carries on very early in the morning for food and attention, and according to cat experts is about 92 in cat years. She is the senior member of the house. As a kitten she was unsure of us but frolicked around as cute as ever and we were charmed. Like all cats she was anti-social and would leave the room in disgust whenever a stranger dared entered her domain.   She went outside to do her business, much appreciated, but seldom at night as we had a curfew on her outings into the dark.  Our big mistake was not getting her a scratching pad so she took her claws to our furniture at a cost. When we...

This is an assignment I did for a MOOCs course run by the University of Melbourne in 2013. It in many ways echoes the present so I want to add it to my blogs. I worked hard but got 95% for my efforts. Getting a graphics to fit from my PDF file was difficult.  What is a climate refugee? Refugees have been traditionally thought of as stateless people fleeing from wars and persecution. Forced Migration is a related term that was used in a recent report by the Environmental Justice Foundation 1 on the impact of climate change in Bangladesh. Indeed this report is a good start to learning about the impacts of global warming on the most vulnerable of communities in the Indian subcontinent. Whether climate refugees or forced migrants we are talking fundamentally about survival, not a better life but almost any life at all, and the likely permanent displacement of people from their homes, communities, and nations due to rising seas. In 1990 the IPCC declared “that the greatest...

Written January 2020 Australia revisited, the tragedy continues Fires have been followed by downpours bringing much needed torrential rain but included in this change of weather are hailstorms that have inflicted billions of dollars of damage, including to scientific research in Canberra, more fires and dead fish and walls of mud and increasing fire risks with a return of hot weather. More animals continue to die and yesterday a water-bombing aircraft crashed with the death of 3 US airmen taking the death toll to 33. Some areas have had massive dust storms so the choking smoke haze has become the dust haze. Throughout this crisis our cars have been covered in dust and water restrictions have forbidden the washing of cars and driveways. Indeed a large dust storm and strong winds blowing outside at present has been reducing vision. See https://tinyurl.com/vpsfrnp     Then there’s the news from the World Economic Forum in Davos The weather has gone berserk with u...

Translated into Italian and published on https://attualita.portobelloplace.it/mondo/laustralia-brucia-viva/   Australia is burning This is an international climate emergency Banners at COP 25 in Madrid proclaimed the words of Greta Thunberg “la casa encendida” or Our house is on Fire, and in Australia it is burning as never before. Temperature records are continually being broken, and the current fires according to Australian fire chiefs are unprecedented. Australia isn’t having a happy new year: front pages and TV news worldwide show daily images of forests up to 50 metres high burning with massive plumes of smoke scarring the skyline. These are cataclysmic events. Fires in the Amazon rain forests last year sent shockwaves around the world but, as seen in the figure above, are minor compared to the current Australian fires still aflame with at least 2 more months of fire season remaining. Can the world afford this environmental catastrophe? Is it a presage, a new norm? ...