ENVIRONMENT MINISTER Greg Hunt has made good on an election promise: he has released the draft legislation for the abolition of the carbon tax. It’s the first legislation the Liberals have put on the table since their election, and you could detect just a little bit of chuffed in Greg Hunt as he announced its release.
This legislation gives one of the parties a free kick, but the question is which one.
Read more http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/10/17/3871067.htm
TOMORROW, IN MELBOURNE’S hallowed ground, the MCG, the rockin’ and rollin’ Dockers will take on the mighty fighting Hawthorn. Who will win? Good question, and there’s a lot of money riding on it.
But let’s pretend for a minute, that you had a super computer that can run a predictive mathematical model, like the one at the headquarters of the Bureau of Meteorology across the CBD on Collins Street. Never mind what the bookies calculate, this machine can do 53,912 gigaflops when it’s really trying.
What data would you punch into the machine? You’d take assessments of how the teams had fared against each other previously, and how they had fared in the kind of weather we expect tomorrow. But the BoM’s computer can take 23 million pieces of input data. So you could punch in a lot more than just that. You could plug in data about each individual player, their injury history, their playing style, their speed and their accuracy.
Let’s pretend that you found 23 million pieces of information about the teams and conditions to plug into the computer and you programmed it to run a simulation of the game.
It says the Dockers win. How confident would you be about the result? You’re right, Hawks fans, let’s run that thing again…
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/09/27/3858063.htm
ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE comes in two flavours: mitigation and adaptation.
Mitigation is where we try to prevent climate change from becoming any worse. That is, we try to stop the release of more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Adaptation is where we try to ready ourselves for the likely effects of climate change. If sea levels are going to rise, for example, we look at levies or planned retreats from the coast. If temperatures are going to soar we make sure railway lines will not buckle in the heat and that hospitals are equipped for surges in people suffering heatstroke.
Adaptation has always been the poorer cousin of mitigation. ‘To solve climate change,’ declared interest groups, ‘we must mitigate the release of greenhouse gases!’
‘Yes!’ shouted pretty much everyone. The United Nations formed a body to address the problem and the world pinned its hopes on a global treaty to prevent the release of greenhouse gases.
As we have seen, however, this hasn’t been the success that was hoped…
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/06/26/3789391.htm
AS WITH ALL THE great momentous events in life, it came and went without much fanfare. Like the beginning and end of life, it was a small series of obvious next steps that culminated in an occasion so significant that it can’t possibly be fully comprehended by one person.
The event, in this case, was the composition of the atmosphere reaching 400 parts of carbon dioxide for every million other parts.
No alarm sounded when the milestone passed. No parade in the street heralded the moment. No riot erupted.
But this obscure scientific measurement marks the the first time our atmosphere has held so much carbon dioxide in three million years….
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/05/15/3759118.htm
Sara Phillips 