In which the pond cancels a few reptiles but somehow "Ned's" natter and the unreformed seminarian survive ...

 

Just for the lolz ...

...and because Dame Slap this day offered this ...

Cancel culture takes centre stage as political activism in the arts becomes increasingly cheap
Increasingly, political messaging by artsy folk resembles the sort of mouthy fashion that Lidia Thorpe wears to a black-tie event at Parliament House.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Being a MAGA cap wearer, the erratic Dame artfully failed to mention the cancel culture actively going down in the USA at the moment ...

There was nary a mention of the likes of Kimmel, Colbert, or all the other cancelling, so it was off to the archive with this blithering, blinkered, one-eyed old bigot.

Being sent to the archive doesn't preclude future consideration, but look at the odds. 

This weekend over on the far right is full of heavyweight contenders ...

The pond can deal with some of them on the Sunday, but sometimes it's easier just to send them to the archive.

Like Steve. If ever there was a candidate for the archive, it's Steve ...

How will we ever convince people the sky is falling in?

If a big scaredy-cat like me could read the government’s climate report without shrieking or bursting into tears (or flames), then I’m sorry to say it didn’t do its job. Perhaps I can help.

By Steve Waterson

The dim-witted Steve thought a half-witted attempt to extract comedy from climate change would be a sure fire winner, but it turned out that he'd just discovered the 2013 film Sharknado, and never mind that we're already up to the sixth outing in that franchise, with three spin-offs ...

That's the best comedy the reptiles can do? 'Nuff said ...

Talk about a tedious out of touch, out of date old fart, so it was off to the archive with him ... which made room for a few more lolz ...

As for the rest, this day Optus and Wally rather stole the headlines...

But a diligent reptile observer could note that running beneath the headlines was a current of climate science denialism ... and not just pathetic Steve ...

There were denialist reptiles standing by to raise alarums...

Emission targets
‘NDIS of energy’ claim, but PM says no new cash
Economists have called the emission reduction target modelling the ‘most appalling bit of policy analysis that has ever come out of Treasury’.

By Greg Brown, Matthew Cranston and Lily McCaffrey

The pond only sent them off to the archive because there was so much other stuff to cover.

The Ughmann and an accomplice were on hand to display their scientific credentials ...

Cold weather deaths drop omitted in climate report
Australia's landmark climate assessment has been accused of cherry-picking data after seemingly ignoring research showing warming temperatures could save more lives than they claim.
By Paul Garvey and Chris Uhlmann

More on the Ughmann later....

First the pond had to climb the "Ned" Everest and was relieved it was just a tepid eight minutes long ...

The header, a clever play on another ancient movie title: Apocalypse now in climate war: higher ambition, deeper conflict in Albanese’s plan, Labor is staking its political future on one of the world’s boldest climate targets. The Coalition says it’s a costly ‘fantasy’. The gamble has reheated the climate wars. Can it succeed?

There was no caption or credit for the incredibly cornball gif-style opening image.

Some of these images have taken to dropping out when the pond accesses the reptile offerings, but when you see that the sole point of the gif is to zoom in on the figures ...

... you realise the reptiles are actually doing the world a favour, and saving eyeballs from wanton visual stupidity.

These omissions don't, however, save you from "Ned's" nattering ...

A more intense climate war is now coming. The Albanese government has staked its claim to the future by tying its fate to the energy transformation – embracing an ambitious 2035 emissions reduction target while the Coalition stands united against Labor on cost and credibility, denouncing its target as a “fantasy”.
In his most important declaration as Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has outlined Labor’s framework for the next 10 years based on a flexible 62-70 per cent reduction on 2005 emissions, sanctified by science advice, justified by Treasury modelling, buttressed by five policy priorities with Labor declaring its path to a bigger economy, more jobs, higher investment and living standards.
Given the history, Labor has embarked on a massive gamble. Albanese called his vision “ambitious but achievable”, a description probably half right and half wrong.
It’s ambitious, no question about that, but claims that it’s achievable are improbable short of impacts far too electorally dangerous.

Cue that image the reptiles love, and the pond has already noted as an example of how the reptiles stack the visual books, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen speak to media during the emissions target press conference in Sydney on Thursday. Picture: AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts

"Ned" was in his standard Chicken Little mode, flapping and squawking .... and stand by for a very long stretch of climbing ...

While Albanese is a generally cautious Prime Minister, the energy transition is the exception. On this front he is a conscript of history – now locked in, struggling to deliver the 43 per cent 2030 reduction target but pledged to a 2035 target that must more than double our decarbonisation rate, halve existing emission levels, take renewables to more than 90 per cent of the electricity grid, deliver a six-fold growth in utility storage, quadruple wind capacity, triple utility solar capacity, secure emissions cuts of a third from industry and resources, ensure half of the light vehicles sold between now and 2035 are EVs, achieve the equivalent of taking transport emissions out of the country twice over the next decade, cease logging of old growth forests and halve re-clearing rates.
Make or break for Labor
That’s all. This is the Labor vision.
The energy transition will become the defining policy – the make or break linchpin – of the Albanese era.
Labor’s plan to restructure the economy away from fossil fuels to a renewables-led model will impose vast and painful shifts across transport, industry, resources and agriculture but can succeed only with massive new private investments, currently far below what is needed for the 2030 aspirations.
The strategy rests on three decisive assumptions – that the world is moving irresistibly to the goal of net zero at 2050; that ambitious targets are essential for national progress and will deliver an economy $2.2 trillion bigger by 2050; and that Australia must take a leading position in this global transition. Indeed, the Climate Change Authority headed by former NSW Liberal Matt Kean said in endorsing Labor’s policy that it “marks one of the most ambitious tracks of any nation, especially in per-capita terms”.
Australia is on par with Europe, given the EU is considering a 63-70 per cent reduction range in its final decision. But Australia is ahead of Canada (45-50 per cent) and New Zealand (51-55 per cent).
Such ambition will be politically contested. There will be no Australian bipartisanship. The key Labor ministers, Albanese, Chris Bowen and Jim Chalmers, are asking much of the public – to wear sacrifices in the short term to deliver down the track the supposed nirvana of a cheaper, greener, more competitive and profitable energy sector. Yet the epic qualification remains: even if Australia realises its targets, that won’t necessarily avert catastrophic global warming because it is unlikely the rest of the world will meet the required global targets.
Will the Australian public buy this deal and, if so, for how long?
The government can take heart from last week’s Newspoll showing 37 per cent backed more ambitious action as opposed to 28 per cent wanting it slower. The overall support for faster action and or sticking with current action ran at 62 per cent.
It is timely to recall the words of former chief scientist Alan Finkel: “The transition to net-zero emissions is the most difficult economic transition undertaken by humanity. Not the most difficult transition since the industrial revolution. Not the most difficult since the second world war. This economic transition is the most difficult ever.”
Any notion Australia can make this transition without economic, environmental and social disruption is fanciful.
Labor is smart giving itself flexibility in the 62-70 per cent range. The fury of the scientific lobby, progressive interest groups and the Greens – all demanding targets of at least 75 per cent – will help Labor argue it is being responsible. Climate Change Minister Bowen repudiated these groups, saying a target above 70 per cent was “unachievable”. The truth that these groups deny is that the task of the Australian government is not to blindly follow a scientific prescription but to act on the overall balance of realisable factors.
Labor’s policy rests on two pillars.
First, advice from the CCA that the target “aligns with what the science demands: strong and urgent action”, but the CCA said the government should aim “for the top of the range”.
Second, the Treasury modelling with its baseline scenario consistent with current policy, finding that renewable energy “continues to be the most cost-efficient abatement” method and will deliver an economy 28 per cent larger by 2035, with real GDP per capita projected to be $12,000 higher in 2035 and $36,000 higher in 2050.
This is the wedge designed to destroy the Coalition attack.
Overreach
Ultimately, this becomes an argument over the optimum economic approach to underpin the energy transition.
While the Coalition’s position is not yet detailed, its direction is obvious. It says Labor’s overreach will damage the economy.
Liberal leader Sussan Ley decisively repudiated Labor’s plan.
Indeed, it briefly seemed that Labor’s policy was the therapy Ley needed to inject some strength and purpose into her climate position. Yet the next day Ley blundered with contradictory statements on Coalition targets.
Announcing that the shadow cabinet was “dead against” Labor’s targets, Ley had said the policy failed to outline the costs for households and businesses in their electricity bills. “Energy is the economy,” Ley said.
“They need to be upfront about what it will actually cost.”

Phew, still here?

Well done.

The reptiles finally broke and provided an interrupting snap, Sussan Ley and the Coalition want answers on costs. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

Heck the pond was so grateful it took a comedy break ...

Then came another vey long stretch of "Neddisms" ...

She said the 2035 target couldn’t be believed because Labor wouldn’t deliver its 2030 target. Ley dismissed the targets as a “fantasy”, saying the modelling Labor produced before the 2022 election had proved to be false.
Ley and opposition Treasury spokesman Ted O’Brien ran the scorecard: since Labor had come to office emissions had flatlined at a 28 per cent reduction, far short of the 43 per cent 2030 target, and electricity costs had increased by 39 per cent or $1300 more as opposed to its promised $275 reduction. They said high energy costs were seeing capital exit Australia.
Ley told the media there was “absolutely” no division in the shadow cabinet in opposing Labor’s “trainwreck energy policy”. It’s a vital point. For the first time since the May election the Coalition – given Labor’s policy – was on the offensive over the energy transition. The reason is obvious: it was attacking Labor, not defending itself over the self-defeating net zero at 2050 issue.
There’s even a bigger point: most Liberal MPs are pretty much united on climate policy when they have a Labor target to hit. The internal split over net zero at 2050 disguises the extent of real agreement and merely gives Labor a winning political argument when its actual policy, revealed this week, is loaded with target-rich opportunities for the Liberals.
The government, once bitten, refused to promise lower power prices. That fraud has been perpetrated on the public for too long. Bowen said modelling did not equate to a political promise, but the Treasury modelling and the CCA point to big income gains over the decade.
The CCA report states: “Expert analysis by the Australian Energy Market Commission projects residential electricity prices will fall by 13 per cent (about 5c/kWh) and average household energy costs will fall by about 20 per cent (around $1000/year) over the next decade under a co-ordinated renewables rollout.”
Former energy minister Angus Taylor told Sky News these claims were “absolute nonsense”. He said departmental predictions that emissions were going to fall over the past 3½ years had been “completely wrong”. The Coalition doesn’t believe in the official advice being tabled by Labor. While ministers point to the advice from Treasury, the CCA and the CSIRO being independent, the Coalition sees the federal bureaucracy being weaponised for Labor’s purposes.
The stakes are high. The game plan of the Albanese government reaches across most of the economy and relies on analysis from many agencies. The bureaucracy is making one of the biggest bets in Australian policy since World War II; namely, that an ambitious emissions reduction target centred on renewables will deliver a more competitive, cheaper, energy efficient, higher-income economy in coming decades.
In a sense this will require a reversal of many current trends, notably the steady increase in power prices for households and businesses, the decline in industry competitiveness due to energy prices, the absence of social and environmental licence for many wind projects, the regulatory obstacles to energy investments along with the recent warning by economist Ross Garnaut that investment in renewable generation was now dependent on government support and intervention.
Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black says while there is a pathway to achieving the targets, it will require “significant capital investment, major reform and exceptional collaboration between the public and private sectors”. He says even the lower end of the range “will be challenging”. The recent BCA report estimated a 60 per cent target at 2035 involved a net transition investment cost of $393 to $480 based on demands in the electricity, resources, transport, industry, building and agricultural sectors.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable warned the transition had to be managed to protect Australia’s international competitiveness and that a unifying national approach was essential with state, territory and federal governments working together.
Support for net zero at 2050 is a near universal commitment, backed by Labor governments, the trade unions, the finance sector, the corporate sector, the main business lobbies including the BCA and the Minerals Council, a majority of economists and the bulk of the not-for-profit sector. In its modelling report the Treasury said while an abandonment of net-zero scenario was not modelled as such, its report overall showed that “not pursuing net zero by 2050 risks lower economic growth, reduced investment, missed export and investment opportunities and higher electricity prices”.
Any retreat by the Coalition from net zero at 2050 or abandonment of the goal would isolate the Liberal Party, compromise its economic message, alienate the party from majority public sentiment and give Labor a clinching case against the Liberals on energy policy.
Indeed, Labor is already mounting this argument.
“The Coalition doesn’t believe in climate action,” Bowen told the ABC on Friday morning. “There’s no surprise there, nor do they accept climate science.”
If the Liberals walk away from net zero, Labor will argue the Liberals are walking away from serious emission reductions and, in effect, have surrendered on the global warning challenge.
Albanese positions himself as a political centrist. He said of the strategy: “This is a responsible target, backed by the science, backed by a practical plan to get there and build on proven technology.
It’s the right target to protect our environment, to protect and advance our economy and jobs, and to ensure that we act in our national interest and in the interests of future generations.” His core message: “If we don’t act there will be a cost to the economy.”
The politics will be accentuated by a new, more turbulent phase in the global energy transition. As the consequences of global warming become more obvious, international pressure to do more will intensify – yet it will be resisted as a result of rising costs, alarm about declining competitiveness, the elevation of Trumpian-like right-wing populist opposition and inhibition arising from the sheer magnitude of the task.
There is no disguising that the Albanese government is taking a massive gamble. It is betting its political future and its economic credibility on a renewables-based transformation of our energy sector feeding into our economic structure.
But don’t fall for the pro-Greens slander that Labor has sold out. That’s nonsense. It’s propaganda from people who have no governing responsibility.
However, if the Liberals decide to walk away from net zero at 2050, they will be taking an even bigger gamble – engaging in the delusion that the Australian people are ready to turn the clock back 25 years and support a party that says serious emission reductions are not the agenda of the age.

Phew, have a break, have a Kit-kat or at the very least, another comical Carr ...

Talk about late night comedy laughs, but that's the last of them because it was the Ughmann who this day became a bigger mountain than "Ned's Everest ...

Of course the pond could have simply sent the Ughmann to the archive ... but where's the challenge in that?

The Ughmann was also in movie mode ...

The header: Labor premieres the latest instalment in its predictable climate franchise, Floods! Fire! Mayhem! Let’s review Anthony Albanese’s horror story, the tale of the targets – and what’s happening in the real world.

There was no credit for the truly dire image, and no real caption, what with the Ughmann's opening line, riffing on this day's reptile movie theme, placed just below the truly pathetic animation ...

The Albanese government premiered the latest instalments in its climate multiverse this week, shows so formulaic you could predict the finale from the trailer.
Act I screened on Monday with a “He’s behind you” pantomime plotline, as the National Climate Risk Assessment delivered a gothic narrative of collapsing coastlines, relentless floods and firestorms sweeping the land. To be terrified by this tale, you have to ignore the fact no one can model the future, and the report’s own multiple storylines, deliberate distortions, inconsistencies and caveats.
But, to borrow a hackneyed phrase to underscore the cliched scripting of this franchise, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Most of the media played its part, suspending disbelief to deliver screaming end times headlines.
Act II followed on Thursday when the Prime Minister assumed the role of leading man and pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 62 and 70 per cent of 2005 levels by 2035 and torched another $8bn to deliver on the receding horizon of cheap green power. The target range is large because the government fears it will miss its 2030 mark by a wide margin.

At this point the pond missed the image, what with a "Loading embed" popping up in lieu of a graphic, and the archive version missing it altogether ...

The pond gave a sigh of relief. The pond could scurry along like the white rabbit, occasionally paying attention to the time, and not bothering with marking any of the Ughmann's work.

The Ughmann has long been an unreformed seminarian determined to deny climate change, climate science, and the wisdom of using renewables, and everything that follows must be refracted through that singular, one-eyed reptile lens ...

The aim is to set the lower bound at what might be vaguely plausible under the laws of physics and pencil in an absurd number to please the large audience whose tastes run to fantasy.
But even if the highest bar were cleared it would do nothing to rescue us from Monday’s apocalyptic tale because these two films are set in different worlds.
Act I is an international blockbuster, its salvation story resting on unprecedented global solidarity with every nation committing to making sacrifices and acting in unison for decades. Without cheating.
Act II is a modest local production that does nothing to alter the plot. Australia could shut down its entire economy tomorrow and it would scarcely register a line in the script of future weather. And even if the whole world closed up shop, sea level rise is already locked in, as it has been for a century.
So let’s review the horror story, the tale of the targets, and what’s happening in the real world.
Convenient omissions
There were three plotlines in the risk assessment: the PG-rated version (+1.5C of warming), MA (+2C) and the X-rated horror show (+3C). These temperature increases were measured against a pre-industrial nirvana, the era before electricity, modern medicine, hot running water and cars. Each warming level was modelled across two timelines, 2050 and 2090. It won’t surprise to learn that every headline and ministerial statement was drawn from the end-of-century X-rated climate snuff movie.
In its table of risks ranked by deaths, heatwaves are named as the biggest killer with 1202 fatalities recorded between 1967 and 2022. Any death is a tragedy for someone but that is 21 deaths a year of people mostly over the age of 80. Yet almost all the news stories faithfully reproduced this arresting sentence: “At +3.0C of global warming, heat-related mortality is projected to increase by 444 per cent in Sydney.”

Another graphics insert went missing at this point, and again the pond was vastly relieved, because there was still much climbing and denialism to do  ...

That raises two obvious questions: where are the baseline numbers for Sydney or any other city? And what are the assumptions?
The answers aren’t in the glossy review but included in a technical annex. Here a different timeframe is used, 2007 to 2017, and it records 1418 excess deaths, or about 141 a year. Sydney’s share was 341 across the decade, or 34 a year. By comparison, Australian road deaths averaged about 1421 a year across the same period.
Why did the authors of the main report deliberately choose to focus on percentages and obscure the raw numbers? Was it because they feared there would be few headlines in the prediction that in 65 years Sydney might record an extra 185 heat-related excess deaths a year of mostly quite old people? A “444 per cent increase” is an editorial choice designed to buy a headline.
The deception goes far deeper. The risk assessment omits the fact far more people die from cold than from heat. This is only hinted at in the technical report but is explicit in the peer-reviewed 2014 paper it cites from Environmental Health Perspectives (Vardoulakis et al).
Page 50 of the annex notes there will be a “large decrease in cold-related deaths” in Townsville. The next page says: “Brisbane, Cairns, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast all currently experience a higher mortality burden during cold days.” This is true in every Australian city.
The Vardoulakis paper is clear: “In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively.” That is more than 16 times as many cold deaths as those from heat. The study projects that by 2080 cold-related deaths will drop to 19 in every 100,000 people each year and heat-related mortality will rise to around eight deaths.
“All results provide strong evidence that the burdens of heat and cold are much higher in age groups 75-84 years and in particular ≥ 85 years,” the Vardoulakis study says.
So, the government’s risk assessment could have said this: “A peer-reviewed study projects that by the 2080s Australia could see roughly 3000 fewer temperature-related deaths each year overall because the fall in cold-related deaths will more than offset the rise in heat deaths.”
This astonishing omission should be corrected by the Australian Climate Service if it is to retain a shred of credibility. Its wilful decision to omit awkward facts reveals this document as a polemic, not a serious piece of research.
The boffins at the service might argue that cold deaths were not in their brief or an oversight. Such profound intellectual dishonesty would be laid bare by the main report, because while the risk review didn’t adjust deaths for people, it did for sheep.
“... an increase in minimum temperatures will marginally decrease cold exposure at lambing”, it says on Page 217.
So, the science was good enough for sheep. For people, the truth was inconvenient.
More evidence of this is littered through the rest of the report.
Tropical cyclones
On tropical cyclones the review admits what is already documented: Australia has recorded a decline in tropical cyclones since the 1980s. This is not a projection, it is an observation that is explicit in chapter 11 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Physical Science Basis report.

The hideous banality of the images that made the cut convinced the pond it hadn't missed anything, Australia has recorded a decline in tropical cyclones since the 1980s. Picture: NewsWire/Glenn Campbell

Now the pond isn't going to get into the weeds with the Ughmann ...

That way lies madness and endless additions and notes to the text, such as this kind of dot point...

Who wants that sort of nuance?

Best just go with the high confidence denialist flow ...

“(Tropical cyclone) landfall frequency over Australia shows a decreasing trend in eastern Australia since the 1800s, as well as in other parts of Australia since 1982. A paleoclimate proxy reconstruction shows that recent levels of (tropical cyclone) interactions along parts of the Australian coastline are the lowest in the past 550-1500 years.”
True to form, Monday’s review tries to scrub this unalloyed good news away with the immediate claim that, based on modelling, cyclones will become more intense. Here the document is internally inconsistent. On page 35 it says “the proportion of category 4 and 5 events may increase (low/medium confidence)”. Low confidence means there is no evidence, medium confidence is a best guess. By page 82 all hedging has gone as the report declares northern Australia will see “significant increases” in tropical cyclones.
Professor Roger Pielke published an article last year on global tropical cyclones that drew on a dataset maintained by Colorado State University. Its records date from 1980 and it uses a metric called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which combines cyclone frequency and intensity. Pielke notes: “Over this time period and according to these metrics, hurricanes have not become more intense.”
Bushfires
On bushfires, the assessment leans heavily into the Black Summer imagery but the technical detail is more guarded. It says that with further warming, fire weather is projected to worsen across most of southern and eastern Australia, with longer seasons and more frequent extreme fire danger days. But confidence varies.

Then came an example of the reptiles relying on entirely predictable imagery to provide some visual relief, The assessment leans heavily into the Black Summer imagery.

Pot meet visual kettle, and again some might want to wander off for a second opinion ...

The Ughmann carried on regardless...

There is high confidence that hotter, drier summers increase fire risk, yet low to medium confidence in the precise regional projections, because local fire behaviour depends on vegetation, ignition sources and land management.
Despite routine headlines about a planet on fire, satellite records and reconstructions show that the total land area burned globally is declining. The Global Fire Emissions Database (Chen et al, Earth System Science Data, 2023) finds a drop of about 1.2 per cent a year from 2001-2020, Fernandez-Garcia and Alonso-Gonzalez (Remote Sensing, 2023) likewise report a significant decline in burned area even as severity increased in some regions, and Guo and Li et al (Earth System Science Data, 2025), reconstructing data back to 1901, show a fall through most of the 20th century, a mid-century rise and then a sharper decline since 2008.
Together these studies make clear that the global burned area has not surged with climate change; it has contracted over the past two decades, especially in savannas and grasslands.
Sea levels
The review also can’t get its story straight on rising sea levels. In one of its headline diagrams it stamps every sea-level rise scenario, from 14cm to more than half a metre, with “high confidence”, as if they are all equally certain.
Yet in the fine print it admits only the near-term rise of 14cm by 2050 is “virtually certain” and that confidence rests on the observed century-long trend of steady rise, not on speculative modelling of end-century extremes.

What sort of tiresome image could the reptiles dig up to enhance the Ughmann's denialism? The review also can’t get its story straight on rising sea levels. Picture: istock

The reptiles can't seem to get their stories straight. That illustration seemed to hint at some threat to seaside homes ...

Do you want coastal erosion?

Or do you want ocean warming?

Never mind, on with the denialism ...

A recent peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (August 2025) examined more than 1500 long-record tide gauges. It reported that “approximately 95 per cent of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea-level rise”.
The argument that there has been a surge in extreme weather events since the 1970s is sourced to the Brussels-based Emergency Events Database. The pioneer of that database, Debarati Guha-Sapir, told Swedish Public Radio this year that the rise was primarily because of a massive increase in reports on disasters because of better communications. She said it would be “dangerous and misleading” to claim there was a fivefold increase in weather-related disasters in the past 50 years.
“You can actually argue that climate disasters, or natural disasters, have not substantially increased, but the reporting has been much easier, much better, much quicker,” Guha-Sapir said.
Lower death toll
One thing is certain, far fewer people die in climate-related disasters today than in the past. UN disaster data shows the global death rate has halved just in the past decade, and longer-term records reveal that while nearly five million people were killed in the 1920s, the toll in the 2010s was closer to 170,000, despite a much larger world population. Disaster deaths have plunged because modern societies have better warning systems, stronger infrastructure, faster emergency response and greater wealth to protect people than a century ago.
Insurance
The review’s economic doomsday story was addressed by AMP chief executive Shane Oliver in these pages. He said the report’s overall cost of $600bn to property values was unrealistic.
“I think that’s a gross exaggeration,” Oliver said.
Amen to that, and it’s true of much else in this review.
The data on the rising cost of insurance, typically, attempts to lay all of the blame on a changing climate. But most of the surge in insured losses it highlights comes down to floods, not an across-the-board climate signal.
Catastrophe costs have jumped mainly because we keep building in harm’s way and because the houses are now worth far more than they once were. Remove rising exposure and soaring property values, and the apparent hockey stick in disaster losses flattens to a far less alarming trend.
In a 2019 Macquarie University report, researchers “normalised” disaster costs, adjusting the numbers for inflation, population growth and rising property values, so that a flood in 1970 could be compared fairly with one today. Once those factors were stripped out, they found “the rising cost of natural disasters is being driven by where and how we choose to live, and with more people living in vulnerable locations, with more to lose, natural disasters remain an important problem irrespective of a warming climate”. Insurance is where this all lands. Climate change is a problem but it is not an existential threat. The question is: How do we respond to it?
Emissions
This much is known, the world’s three-decade quest to cut carbon emissions has been a debacle. Trillions have been spent on mitigation, yet global carbon dioxide emissions keep rising and the world is consuming record levels of coal, oil and gas. It does so because fossil fuels provide the dense, reliable energy that underpins modern prosperity and ultimately no society votes to be poor.

Then came the most risible image of all, though no doubt a delight to reptiles devoted to the spewing of smoke, The world’s three-decade quest to cut carbon emissions has been a debacle. Picture: istock

Time for a final, lengthy, seemingly interminable emission ...

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen launched Monday’s risk review with the mantra that “the cost of inaction will always outweigh the cost of action”. This is true only if your action is rational and proportionate. The cost of stupid action will be crippling, as taxpayers’ dollars are immolated on mitigation and we still bear all the costs of adaptation.
A sensible government would read the room. China, India, Russia and the US are not cutting their emissions and even carbon-cutting crusaders are hedging their bets. Canada’s newly announced 2035 emissions target of a 45 to 50 per cent cut from 2005 levels has barely shifted from its existing 2030 pledge, effectively extending the same ambition by five more years. Canada has vast amounts of hydro power and nuclear energy, while our gamble is that we can make bigger cuts based on the part-time power of wind and solar.
Against this backdrop the Albanese government has decided it will march towards 2035 trying to deliver a 62 to 70 per cent reduction in its global rounding-error emissions. This despite all the evidence that points to it missing the 2030 mark of 43 per cent. And we haven’t even started the hard part.
Since 2005 Australia’s net emissions are down about 28 per cent, roughly 1.5 per cent a year. But almost all of this came from changes in land use, which boosted the amount of carbon absorbed by trees and soil. If these are excluded, the 28 per cent reduction collapses to a meagre 2.8 per cent.
The low-hanging fruit has been picked. To reach the 2030 target emissions would need to fall by nearly double the pace so far and it will have to come by making genuine cuts in energy, transport and agriculture.
Now survey the local landscape to see how plausible that is. In Western Australia Labor Premier Roger Cook has conceded that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions will rise, driven by expansion of gas and heavy industry projects that he argues are essential to the global energy transition. In Queensland the life of coal-fired power stations is being extended beyond 2035 to keep the lights on. NSW has already extended the life of its biggest coal generator and in Victoria offshore wind is now off the agenda, but it is still in the budget for cutting carbon emissions.
Costs
Everywhere energy transition projects are delayed, costs blow out, the green hydrogen dream evaporates and electricity prices march ever upward.
The Australian Energy Regulator’s State of the Energy Market 2025 details why electricity bills will keep rising. Even though there are more hours when wholesale prices go negative because of wind and solar flooding the grid, those lows are dwarfed by extreme price spikes that drag the annual average higher. This trend will continue.
On top of that, the cost of poles and wires keeps rising, as billions are poured into new transmission lines to link renewable zones and into upgrades to ageing local distribution networks. Add up wholesale volatility, higher transmission charges and rising distribution costs, and the report shows the trend for households and businesses is towards persistently higher bills. And the regulator warns reliability margins are tightening, too, with growing risks of blackouts in states such as NSW and Victoria as coal exits.
Now all we have to do is find yet-to-be-invented scalable technologies to make those pillars of the modern world, steel, cement, plastic and synthetic fertiliser.
No one can model the future but I fear that, in Act III, this all ends very badly.

It is hard to decide whether this movie is a tragedy or a farce. Whatever it is, the audience will pay dearly for the ticket.

The pond will make only one comment. 

It's past bloody time for the reptiles to give the movie metaphors a rest, especially as talking about a three act movie structure is singularly depressing and very much old school, the sort of crap that ruined many a second rate Hollywood mind ... harking back to the days when the likes of the tiresome Syd Field was peddling his tired ideas to desperate screenwriters in urgent need of a quick fix.

Inter alia ...

...The three (four, five, six, or seven) act structures are the arbitrary divisions of the principal (or main) action of the story into a number of parts - a legacy from the theatre and applicable today only to the theatre or television shows which have commercial breaks. If you write a movie for television, it will have seven acts. Why? Because it has seven commercial breaks. And you will be asked to insert something intriguing at the end of each act to lure the audience back after the break. But that has nothing to do with story.
The Greeks had no act structure in their plays. The plays had one act. The Romans had five acts. It's arbitrary. It appeared in plays because of the need to have intermissions. People can't sit for three hours in a theatre listening to an auditory experience without taking a break or going to the restroom. It appears in television shows because they want to have commercial breaks so they can sell something. None of which has anything to do with story.
A two hour feature film shown in a movie theatre is a continuous action. There are no intermissions. It's one continuous act-less event which revolves around a problem. A much better way to look at a story, when you are creating one, is not through any arbitrary division into acts but through the eyes of that problem, which is the central event and the heart of a great story's structure.
In The Silence of the Lambs, a serial killer is on the loose, and that is the problem that has to be resolved. In Gladiator, a tyrant has usurped the Roman Empire, preventing the restoration of the Republic. In The Sixth Sense, a murdered child psychologist is stuck in limbo and the spirits of dead people are haunting a little boy's mind. In Independence Day, aliens have invaded the Earth. In Star Wars, the Evil Empire has taken possession of the galaxy. In The Iliad, not to be mistaken for a movie called Troy, the Greek army is being decimated because their best warrior has dropped out of the fight. In King Arthur, the kingdom is in a state of anarchy and has to be reunified. In Harry Potter, Voldemort is trying to take possession of the Wizard World. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron, a very similar dark force, is trying to take possession of Middle Earth. In Ordinary People, a young boy is suicidal. In The Exorcist, it's a problem of demonic possession. In Jaws it's a shark problem. In The Mummy it's a mummy problem. In The Perfect Storm it's a weather problem. In Jurassic Park it's a dinosaur problem. In Traffic it's a drug problem. In Armageddon it's an asteroid problem. In Erin Brockovich it's an environmental problem. Each of these stories and hundreds of others I could name all revolve around a problem that has to be resolved.

In short ...

And what need is there to think of these events as having three acts? None.

And what need is there to think of the Ughmann as having any relationship to actual science, climate change, and global warming?

None.

And now to end with a little more cancel culture, thanks to the immortal Rowe ...