In which Polonius prattles on in a way as stale as 2013, while the dog botherer serves up another wretchedly familiar parritch of denialism...

 

Oh dear ...

The pond has long indulged prattling Polonius as the lead for its Sunday meditation, ever since the Pellists shuffled off to a void, and the Jensenists made the angry Anglicans completely irrelevant.

But the pond isn't sure how much longer this indulgence should last ...

The header, in which the DEI-inflected "diversity" is actually code for "conservative-free zone": Will ABC managing director Hugh Marks finally address lack of diversity? It’s the reason why so many ABC programs are so boring but unless managing director Hugh Marks recognises the broadcaster’s left-of-centre ethos, don’t expect anything to change.

The caption for the incredibly boring snap: ABC managing director Hugh Marks addresses the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond rarely bothers to provide an archive link to the original source document.

There are a couple of reasons, as demonstrated by the link in Polonius's opening sentence:

It was very much a “home ground” event on Wednesday this week when Hugh Marks addressed the National Press Club in Canberra for the first time as managing direc­tor and editor-in-chief of the ABC.

The link just took readers to another part of the hive mind:

And unfortunately that story hadn't been archived, so suddenly the pond was lumped with the burden of performing an archiving in the intermittent archive... ABC boss Hugh Marks: scrutiny is reasonable but we do things that no other media can.

Such ways lead to madness, even more maddening than the madness of reading Polonius whine for the squillionth time about the ABC:

The Canberra press gallery contains but a few political conservatives. Most Canberra-based journalists regard themselves as what, in private, they would term as progressive, meaning left-of-centre or leftists in fact.
Marks was successful in his previous role at Nine. But the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster is quite a different outfit.
At Nine, the task of management is to make profits and keep the share price as high as possible. At the ABC, management heads to Canberra every now and then with a begging bowl seeking for it to be filled with lots of taxpayers’ money. Moreover, unlike commercial media, the ABC has a guaranteed regular income flow.
Despite the calls by some ABC critics for the ABC to be privatised and sold off, this is unlikely to ever happen. The ABC receives strong support from the Labor and Greens parties along with the teals. It also has support among some rural-based Liberal Party MPs plus the Nationals.

It's a relief that the pond can at least screen cap the AV distractions, and offer only the reptile description ... ABC Managing Director Hugh Marks claims the ABC had a “defensive mindsight” which drove a “counter-productive behaviour”. “It’s so important that everybody is not second-guessing themselves and thinking I’ve got to tick this off or tick that off,” Mr Marks said. “Sometimes mistakes happen.”

Polonius did his best, but his best these days is sounding distinctly enfeebled.

 Being of an age, the pond doesn't want to sound ageist, but Polonius's wiki reports him as being born in 1945, which is a long time to have a single bee buzzing around in the hive mind noggin.

To quote Polonius, "yawn":

Marks’s address to the NPC was bland at best and dull at worst. No doubt it was drafted by the ABC communications department which, for the most part, fails to communicate. Marks described his employer as “a precious national asset of a kind that you won’t find in many other countries”. How nice.
Marks also declared: “We are not beholden to political patronage or commercial investment or touchy advertisers. We are free for everyone.”
This does not say much for the journalism at, say, Nine.
In any event, Marks’s assessment can never be tested. We simply do not know how many Australians would support the ABC if they had to pay a subscription fee. Like, for example, the viewers of Sky News.
The BBC is primarily funded by a licence fee. It is illegal to watch Britain’s national broadcaster without making a payment. This means the British public has some autonomy with respect to the BBC, involving a “don’t-watch-don’t-pay” option. Australian taxpayers, however, have no such option.
In his 25-minute address, Marks made only one criticism of the ABC. He suggested the ABC should do more to own its mistakes, learn from them and do better. That was it. Yawn.
However, life became more interesting when question time emerged. The ABC’s Jane Norman was hosting the NPC event. She recently took over from the ABC’s Laura Tingle. This suggests an ABC-NPC entente. At the conclusion of the talk, Norman said, “Hugh, thank you for your address today.” It was as if your man Hugh were a bestie, so informal was the thank you. But, then, the ABC is very much a workers collective (or soviet) where the staff essentially run the joint – so, in a sense, Hugh is just another comrade.

The pond hasn't got the foggiest clue where Polonius got the notion that "diversity" might be a good new club in his age-old hacking in the ABC sand trap. Apparently the old fogey hasn't caught up with the news that such talk is "woke": The Australian’s Jack Quail livened up questions for Marks with a focus on the lack of viewpoint diversity. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond quailed at the sight of this Quail - the hair, the leer, the hair! - but even more at the way that Polonius kept droning on ...

Norman asked about the current controversy at the BBC over its Panorama program’s reporting about President Donald Trump. Marks suggested “they have been chipping away at that (the BBC’s) independence”. This overlooked the fact that the BBC has apologised to Trump for its misreporting of his January 6, 2021, speech.

The madness of King Donald I?

Why, lordy, long absent lordy, the pond had been hoping for a chance to segue to that bizarre bit of "truthing" ...

Sheesh, barking mad, a toddler deprived of his ancient, ragged teddy bear ... and like many other outlets, the Beeb simply doesn't know how to deal with the coup-loving authoritarian.

That's the sort of rant that would see others locked up, and it appeared right at the time that he's busy selling Ukraine down the river, noted in the Graudian with these lines...

...US officials have said the text was hammered out after consultations with Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s national security and defence council secretary, and a close Zelenskyy ally. Umerov – a former defence minister – made several modifications, they added. He denied this, saying Kyiv would not accept terms that violated its sovereignty.
The reaction from Ukrainian civil society has been overwhelmingly negative. People have variously dismissed the plan as one-sided and tantamount to Ukraine’s abject surrender. It comes as Zelenskyy is under immense pressure at home after a corruption scandal involving his former business partner and at least two of his ministers.
The plan also failed to win over senior European commentators. Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institute described its drafting as “appalling” and said its substance was “outrageous”. If enacted, it would lead to Russia becoming the “apex predator in Europe”, she observed. “Truly marks the complete enshittification of diplomacy,” she added on X.

Instead of looking at interesting events taking place in the world, the pond was left with the needy Polonius whining into his parritch ...

Life livened up further when Marks took questions from Sky News’ Cameron Reddin and The Australian’s Jack Quail. Marks declared there wasn’t any comparison between the BBC’s report of Trump’s speech and that of the ABC in its Four Corners program of February 1, 2021. This was mere denial. The BBC’s report was more unprofessional than the ABC’s, but the ABC’s Four Corners report also contained errors.
However, Marks conceded that, as with the BBC, there were discussions in existence about the ABC’s reportage of transgender issues. Until this moment, there had been no recognition by Marks of any problems with the ABC’s programming.
But then Marks let his no-problems-here stance falter. He said the ABC “should provide program formats that enable different relevant perspectives to meet in a more of a town-hall format”.
The questions from the two News Corp journalists were directed at the ABC’s essential problem; namely, the lack of viewpoint diversity. For starters the ABC is a conservative-free zone, without a conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its main news and current affairs programs.
ABC management and some ABC journalists deny this, but no one has been able to name one such conservative.
Take one example. Rightly or wrongly, 60 per cent of Australians voted No in the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous voice to parliament. I cannot think of one prominent ABC journalist in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra who would have voted No.

That's being lively? This snap is lively? 

Former BBC Director General Tim Davie at Broadcasting House in London. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

On and on Polonius whined and moaned and bitched about "diversity", like some progressive in the grip of a furry heat ... and ye ancient tasty cats and edible dogs, how far back can he go?

Cat, eat boring 1960s and 1970s Polonial hard tack:

And then there is the lack of viewpoint diversity in so many ABC current affairs programs containing panels where everyone essentially agrees with everyone else in an essentially left-of-centre way. This is primarily because many conservative commentators have been cancelled by the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster while some others do not like appearing before hostile presenters and audiences.
That’s why so many ABC programs are so boring. Witness the final days of The Drum and Q+A.
The ABC’s current affairs were captured by the left in the late 1960s and early 70s by influential leftist Allan Ashbolt. This is referred to in KS Inglis’s semi-official ABC history titled This is the ABC (MUP, 1983). Ashbolt’s influence lives on beyond the grave.
On ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra on November 15, presenter Nick Bryant interviewed the former BBC executive Roger Mosey. Both are left-of-centre types.
However, Mosey acknowledged that “there is probably some sort of bias or unconscious bias going on there (at the BBC) in the way it deals with Donald Trump”.
He said “the BBC has got a sort of benign, slightly paternalistic liberal drive behind it which doesn’t really reflect necessarily the countries we’re all becoming now”.
That is the problem with the BBC and the staff-controlled ABC. It appears that Marks has yet to recognise the ABC’s left-of-centre or liberal (in the American and British sense of the term) ethos.
Unless he does, don’t expect the ABC to be anything but a conservative-free zone lacking viewpoint diversity.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

On a whim, or perhaps as a result of that ancient history lesson, the pond decided to use Duck amuck to research Polonius's chorus of "conservative-free zone". 

The pond set the timer to between 2015 and 2020 ... and sure enough ...

Ah, the great dropping, the sundering, the tearing apart, and the beginning of the never-ending grief.

Without being too Freudian about it, Polonius has never forgotten or forgiven being dropped, and for not being given something in compensation for his endless suffering at the hands of the cardigan wearers ...like a tasty radio program to go out in the wee hours on RN and earn the ABC yet another * in the ratings ...

But is it fair just to go 2015-2020? 

What about even earlier? 

Yes, it's been an eternal whine, with hits showing for the period 2010-2015:

Eek, there it was, blather about the ABC being a "conservative-free-zone" way back in 2013 ...

Not original idea to be found buzzing around in that old noggin.

The trouble with this monotonous repetition machine, as boring as Homer Simpson in an "all you can devour" restaurant, is that the pond has no time for anything else.

Look at the Graudian, making plans for Nigel this weekend ...

Jolly good stuff, but there's no room in the Polonial room for nogoodinskis of the Nigel kind ...

How to segue to the weekend infallible Pope?

No way with these reptiles.

How to move to the decline and fall of Marge, by way of Idrees Kahloon in The Atlantic?

The GOP Is Realizing That Trump Won’t Be Around Forever
The intra-party fight over the Epstein files was only the prelude

...Consider the recent journey of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump ultra-loyalist who one year ago was comparing him to Jesus Christ (“The man that I worship is also a convicted felon. And he was murdered on a Roman cross.”). The Georgia Republican has been one of the prime agitators for the release of the Epstein files, leading to a spat with Trump, who rebranded her as Marjorie “Traitor” Greene. And  Greene has been tangling with Trump in other ways. She criticized the bailout of Argentina, denounced Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, and argued during the government shutdown that the administration should negotiate with Democrats on health-care subsidies. She also said that the president was taking too many foreign trips, reneging on his promise to put America first. “I would love to see Air Force One be parked and stay home,” she told CNN. Trump says that Greene is angry over his refusal to endorse her for a Senate seat or for the governorship of Georgia. But if you see her as an avatar for the “America First” base—conspiratorial QAnon leanings and all—her character arc does not bode well for the president.

Bode well? Alas, it's perhaps Marge that won't be around forever.Going, going gone ...

The night they drove old Marge down

All the Rothschild space lasers were singing ...

President Marge?!

Instead of these excitements, the pond is left with the detritus of a dog botherer as a tepid bonus, still blathering on in exactly the same climate denialist way as the Ughmann and the bromancer in yesterday's pond...

Talk about stale bills of goods, talk about ancient reheated parritch designed to fry the brain ...

The pond was glad it slipped in a reference to that nogoodinski Nige, and as for WMD Tony Bleagh ... please forgive the pond doing an upchuck into the Bleagh bucket ...

The header: Finally, the Coalition comes to its senses on net zero of bad policy, When the Coalition grasps the facts and summons the conviction to run hard on this stuff, it will humiliate Labor, the Greens and teals and revive Australians’ hopes of economic security.

The caption for the wretched collage for which Emilia bravely took credit: Increasingly, Western leaders are realigning on net-zero commitments. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella

Oh Emilia, how many times must the pond urge you to let AI take the credit.

Only AI would think that the mindlessly moronic, seemingly endless visual invocation of whale-killing windmills means anything outside the hive mind...

Back to that archive problem ...

At least this archiving of the dog botherer's opening line ...

If ever the Coalition had a week when its opposition to net zero by 2050 was vindicated, this was it. The trouble is it is still so conflicted on these issues, at state and federal levels, that it is too gun-shy to make its case strongly enough and take full advantage.

...led to an archived link ...

But that makes it easy to see why the pond doesn't bother with the links.

As the pond has noted almost as many times as Polonius has blathered on about the ABC, it's like booking in to the Hotel California.

You can never leave:

It's just an endless circle of navel-gazing and fluff-gathering inside the hive mind, a seemingly never ending incestuous ouroboros ...
The lessons were there in the circus of sanctimony that is the UN COP conference, and the rabble of killing season in state Liberal partyrooms. And they were there, too, in new revelations about price rises to come, persistent inflation preventing more interest rate cuts, and even Labor bringing new fossil-fuelled generation on stream.
When the Coalition grasps the facts and summons the conviction to run hard on this stuff, it will eventually humiliate the Labor, Greens and teals net-zero alliance and revive the nation’s hopes of economic security. How any so-called Liberal could align themselves with the idiotic fantasy of net zero by 2050 is beyond me.
The facts on energy and climate, and the reality of what is unfolding, align against the net-zero zealots. Once the Coalition settles into strong and consistent advocacy for an alternative path, it will find all the developments in this space, from bill rises to blackouts, will vindicate its stand and buttress its position.

Once again the reptiles forgot to bold the sub-headers, so the pond had to do the job for them...

‘Bills will increase for the next decade’

Take the report from the Australian Energy Council this week, remembering this is an industry grouping that is committed to the renewables transition. It surveyed the anonymous views of 16 industry chief executives and summarised their views as a warning that electricity prices will continue to rise for at least a decade.
“Above all else, members feel that policymakers need to keep their focus on affordability, the ‘achilles heel’ of the energy transition,” the AEC said. This report puts the lie to the argument from Labor, the Greens and the teals that is parroted by the AEC itself, that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity.

At this point the solar-Sauron, latter day Satan to the reptiles intruded, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen says he is ready to assume the full powers of the COP31 presidency, even as Australia steps aside to allow Turkey to host next year’s UN climate conference. Under a proposed compromise, the summit would be held in Turkey while Bowen leads the negotiations, with pre-COP events and a climate funding pledging meeting staged in the Pacific. Bowen argues the plan preserves global climate leadership and avoids the summit defaulting to Bonn, as nearly 200 nations work toward consensus at COP30 in Brazil.

Meanwhile, the relentless denialism continued apace ...

Clearly that is true only of direct generation. When transmission, storage and firming are included, the costs escalate way beyond what we have traditionally seen.
“My feel is that bills will increase for at least the next decade, given the scale of capital being deployed in the industry,” one chief executive said.
Another warned: “I think it’s the calm before the storm, and I think the storm is coming around cost and compet­itiveness and international competitiveness, and industrialisation.”
This would not be a surprise to anyone who follows these issues closely or reads this newspaper regularly, but it is still yet to penetrate the broader public debate to the extent it should. As one of the chief executives said: “The general public haven’t really cottoned on to the fact that there’s a cost to the transition, and power bills will go up for a while before they go down, governments have made promises about bill reduction, but it is not coming anytime soon.”

The ultimate indignity? The reptiles pretending they were for the workers ... 

The perversion of energy policy... from a so-called workers’ party

The report warns that those who can afford it least will be hit the hardest. This applies to small businesses, energy-intensive industries, and families who cannot afford to spend many thousands of dollars to access government-subsidised solar panels and batteries.
Think about the perversion of these policies from a so-called workers party. Some of the taxes paid by low-income workers who struggle to pay steadily rising electricity bills are funnelled into subsidies for wealthier people installing home batteries to reduce their power bills.
At the COP30 virtue-signalling jamboree in Brazil, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen spruiked this policy as proof that “what’s good for the planet is also good for your pocket”. What a snake-oil salesman – he failed to mention he has delivered the nation’s highest electricity prices, turning an energy-rich nation into an energy basket case.
While Labor keeps trying to convince people that renewables can power the nation, the national electricity market is still dominated by fossil fuels, with coal and gas supplying about 60 per cent.

The reptiles decided to fling in a man with Little to be Proud of ... Nationals Leader David Littleproud claims Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been “shamed into giving up” Australia’s $2 billion bid for the COP Summit. “This was nothing more than a glorified attempt for Anthony Albanese to walk onto the world stage and gratuitously say how good he is, all at the taxpayer’s expense,” Mr Littleproud told Sky News Australia. “Just give it up. There are Australians tonight who cannot afford to put dinner on the table.”

The pond doesn't want to keep griping, but this relentless, monotonous carping and whining stops the pond from getting out and about.

Not to waste time on genuine climate change news ... that's best left to the profs at The Conversation, or to The Graudian ...

The pond wants time on a meditative Sunday to look at the lighter side of corporate greed ... like that story in Rolling Stone ... with Faux Noise being truly Xian rip off merchants, in the spirit of King Donald Xianity, a timely reminder of how to behave in the run up to the late-starting this year war on Xmas ...

And so on, and the Graudian liked it so well that it picked the yarn up and ran with it ...

Instead of such simple pleasures, the pond must writhe in the grip of climate science denialism.

There's only so much denialism a possum should be forced to bare on a weekend, and yet here we are, without a single shred of clothing ...

The Albanese government has been very quiet about the new 1000-megawatt gas-fired generator about to come on line at Kurri Kurri in NSW’s Hunter region.
The cost of this project has more than tripled from $600m to $2bn after Labor’s implausible plan to run it on hydrogen was scuttled, making it one of about a dozen major hydrogen projects to fail in the past couple of years. Instead, the plant will burn natural gas stored on site with diesel tanks for back-up fuel, which could create problems for sustained usage.
This is not the sort of generation you would build if you believed your renewables-plus-storage model could work. As the intermittent renewables build-out continues and more coal is retired, we will need much more of this type of gas generation, yet even still, without baseload generation, we will be vulnerable.
This goes to why the renewables-plus-storage plan as outlined by the government will not happen. No comparable country has been able to go close to what we are trying to do as a world first.
None of them is even trying. At least not without substantial levels of emissions-free nuclear power.

Ah the good old "nuke the country to save the planet" routine, with the dog botherer yet to catch on that the new buzz word is geothermal ...(as noted yesterday):

Net-zero leaders toppled

This week we also saw two Liberal state leaders toppled. Victoria’s Brad Battin and NSW’s Mark Speakman were both committed to net zero by 2050 (or 2045 in Victoria’s case) and therefore locked in behind the energy folly of their state Labor governments, ignoring the opportunity for policy differentiation. Sadly, their replacements are likely to stick with the net-zero fad, unless and until Sussan Ley can talk them around. It seems astonishing that any sentient beings can watch the current national energy self-harm unfold and not oppose it.
Given the federal government has no constitutional power over energy and the states have no obligation to the Paris Agreement or any other supranational commitments, it is important the two tiers of governance work through this in simpatico. The parlous state of the Liberal Party in both states and federally after going to numerous elections supporting net zero by 2050 provides a clue to the political imperative.

The reptiles tried to make over Victoria ... Ousted leader of the opposition and net-zero backer Brad Battin watches on from the back bench. Picture: NewsWire/Ian Currie

Yet you could read in The Age that Brad's replacement had a few blots on the escutcheon ... (Jess) Wilson, a Gen-Y lawyer and former adviser to Josh Frydenberg whose advocacy guided the Business Council of Australia to its support of net zero by 2050

Not to mention cockroach replacement Kellie, featured in the Graudian ... a Sloane not so far from a groan ...

...the NSW Liberals confirmed their commitment to net zero by 2050 this week and Sloane also confirmed that the interim targets – including a 70% reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2035 – are also still in place.
In an interview with Guardian Australia, Sloane attempted to play down the division, saying: “It wouldn’t be the first time, you know, a state party had a difference with their federal colleagues over a policy position.”
But climate change policy is a big one. What the federal government does directly impacts on state plans.
Sloane also insists the NSW Liberals remain committed to renewables rollout, augmented by gas, and to the phase-out of coal-fired power in NSW.
“The facts are that our coal-fired stations aren’t going to last beyond 2033. Eraring [power station] has been extended, and it may well need to be extended further,” she said.
“But that doesn’t mean that we’re not focused on the practical considerations that are causing a lot of concern on the ground right now. We need to be absolutely focused on people’s concerns about energy bills, around the transition when it comes to renewables, with the rollout of renewables in regional communities in particular.
“It’s creating a situation of haves and have nots in a lot of communities and our Nationals colleagues, our Liberal colleagues in regional NSW are seeing that first-hand, seeing the pain in their communities.”
Perhaps Sloane can find a policy formula to both meet the targets and make the rollout more palatable to rural communities, without actually slowing it down, scaring away investment or pissing off her Nationals partners. Easier said than done.

This is the snake-pit into which the dog botherer, Sky Noise after dark, the lizard Oz, and all the rest of the Murdochians have led the hapless Libs - a dead end populated by sods like the drunken Barners, Tamworth's shame, the Canavan caravan, the barking mad fundamentalist pastie Hastie, the fellow travelling coward who has Little to be Proud of, and so on ...

The pond is so over it, and decided to gulp down the last of the DB offering as a way to avoid the over-powering stench of stale hubris ...

With inflation too high, interest rates holding firm, a cost-of-living crunch, and businesses and industries threatened by electricity costs, the deleterious impact of the emissions-first approach to energy abounds. Electricity is the lifeblood of the economy, so its affordability and reliability must take precedence over nods to global targets that cannot and will not have any effect on the climate.
Besides, for all the rhetoric and costs (subsidies for renewables to force coal out, subsidies for coal to maintain supplies, grants and subsidies for batteries, pumped-hydro and failed hydrogen projects, payments and tax breaks for home solar, batteries and electric vehicles, rebates paid to artificially ease electricity bills, and all the rest of it), Australia’s emissions were higher last year than when the Coalition was in power – 441.9 million tonnes in 2021 compared with 446.4 million tonnes in 2024.

‘An embarrassing frenzy of hypocrisy and indulgence’

In this bizarre climate the Albanese government was prepared to spend at least $1bn and possibly $2bn hosting next year’s COP31 in Adelaide. Imagine what an embarrassing frenzy of hypocrisy and indulgence that would have been – Labor has feigned disappointment, but I think the government, like taxpayers, has dodged a bullet.
Bowen’s compromise plan for Turkey to host the conference and hold a hosting presidency while he gets a presidency for negotiations, and the Pacific Islands get a pre-COP summit is eerily similar to what he is doing to our energy grid – making it increasingly complicated and ineffectual.
The idea that the man who is overseeing our energy masochism should seek to advise other nations on emissions reduction plans is the cherry on the top of a week that has proven what a feast of futility the net-zero obsession has become.
The Adelaide lord mayor and two suburban Adelaide mayors managed to squeeze in trips to Brazil before their city lost the bid – imagine that, publicly funded missions for local councils to save the planet. On her return the mayor of Mitcham, Heather Holmes-Ross, was asked by The Australian’s and FiveAA’s David Penberthy whether she had purchased carbon offsets for her flight.
Holmes-Ross had no clue what Penberthy was talking about. And she said someone else had booked her flights anyway. I bet they did; sadly, they booked return.
So, all things being equal, if Bowen can do to the COP process what he has done to the electricity market, all will be forgiven. We are now into our third decade of emissions reduction fanaticism and we are yet to have a serious public debate about costs and benefits.
Politicians from all sides have let us down badly, prioritising fashion over facts and politicking over policy. The Coalition must grasp this opportunity to right the national debate and reset policy.
Ley keeps asking when electricity prices will come down, which is fair enough. But how about asking who has benefited from the massive upheaval and expenditure of the transition so far? How much has it cost and to what avail?

To what avail? 

Not much bloody avail at all ...

In 1995, when the first “conference of the parties” (Cop) of the UN’s climate change convention met in Berlin, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was approximately 360.67 parts per million. The then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, gave a passionate speech about how greenhouse gases must be reduced to save the planet from overheating. There was a relatively unknown East German woman, the environment minister, Angela Merkel, chairing the conference. She was red hot at keeping order. The UK journalists concluded she would have a bright future.
Immediately after the conference I was commissioned to write a book about climate change called Global Warming: Can Civilization Survive? It sold well and was the first of several.
Scroll forward through Kyoto, Paris and the annual ritual of 30 years of Cops and the same speech Kohl made has been repeated, sometimes almost word for word, by prime ministers, presidents and campaigners year after year.
As I write, the carbon level – recorded daily in this paper – has reached 426.68 parts per million – well over scientists’ so called “safe” limit of 350. According to them, the planet is heading towards oblivion. All that time news editors have told me not to be too downbeat; let’s have some optimism.
This is my last column. I think the facts speak for themselves.

No, the facts never speak for themselves. 

The denialists blather on, News Corp remains an undiluted force of evil, the world tinkers at the edges, the hive mind only speaks to itself and its fluff-gathering navel, and the planet grinds on to calamity ...

... but as we're speaking of De river Nile, at least we'll have the 'toons for comfort ...

And the pond seems to have missed out on TT this week, and better late than never to beam him up ...

On the other hand, American medical science is in tip top condition, as good as a work out in Marge's gym ...