Tag: Climate change

  • “Inaccurate and even fraudulent reporting”

    If Trump said that, it must be wrong, right? Wrong. (Alas, when will we learn that even our enemies may occasionally have a point?) Even the New York Times, even the Washington Post and even the Guardian and Le Monde need sponsors, sponsors with large purses, very large purses, people like Jeff Bezos. I bet…

  • “We”

    While Australia is burning, I listen to a radio programme titled “What will the next decade bring?” Two enthusiastic men, both of them social scientists with PHDs about “future prospects”, believe it or not, gleefully exclaim that in the course of the coming decade “we” will be colonising planets. That word, “we”, is just about…

  • Caution

    I have written elsewhere on this site that we all should do our utmost to form a protective ring around the “Reporters sans frontiers” (RSF) and other journalists who risk their necks to tell us what is going on. At the same time, I abhor those who kill, maim or otherwise persecute people on the…

  • Please, please, please turn the ship around

    Janet doesn’t want to have children because she cannot bear the thought of the future she imagines would await them. Her mother angrily tells her not to be “so silly!” though she cannot explain what’s so silly about her daughter’s well-founded fears. The fifteen-year-old in the house next door is playing truant today, to go…

  • One way or another

    Sometimes I walk my dog with a very kind and very large man with a very kind and very large dog. His is not a frivolous mind, far from it; he does a great deal more thinking than most people I know. And of course, as can be expected of a man who thinks a…

  • I was wrong

    Climate change is picking up speed and impact like an avalanche, wiping out one poor community after another. It’s ineluctable consequences can no longer be downplayed as something we can take in our stride, because we can’t. Or rather, rich nations still can, but by 2050, those of us who are still alive may wish…

  • To the slaughterhouse

    Mine is a green country. Not politically green, albeit, but green as in pine trees, mountain rivers and grasshoppers. No, I don’t live in Greenland, which is not green, as it happens. Moreover, my country is only green for four months a year, and I grew up wearing long woollen underwear for the remaining 8…

  • A new year

    What if we lived in a world where the powers-that-be set out to eradicate children who were less than excellent students, women who were less than very sexy, men who were not both muscular and smart? Such a policy would be far more radical than mere eugenics, (cf. Nazism and Joseph Mengele), yet enterprises in…

  • Football from the sidelines

    Almost blinded by the sun and my own perspiration as I drag myself up the steep hill, I find that the cobbled roads are near empty while the normally empty bars are packed. Packed with men, shouting men. Football, I assume, and snarl. Mind you, I don’t at all mind football. What bothers me is…