![fire bike small](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/fire-bike-small.jpg)
How They Made a Pyre of the Bush
One of the invariable outcomes of a major bushfire like the one that is lashing the karri forest as I write, is that the debate about hazard-reduction burning always resurfaces. The Greens and their supporters in the leafy suburbs and university campuses, who are never threatened by bushfires from one year to the next, all oppose it. The emergency services bosses, whose status and budgets would decline if hazards were reduced, talk it down (while all the time calling for more firefighters and greater investment in helicopters and tankers). The wine-grape growers, concerned only for their profits, threaten to sue if the merest whiff of smoke blows across their vines. The media, which love a big fire almost as much as they love stirring possums, are ambivalent — they can’t really come out and say that they don’t like it … after all, if you oppose hazard reduction you are basically saying you support hazard retention. But journalists find irresistible the battle scenes associated…
Academics and others who dare to question the majority view are brutally told the science has been settled. Many such dissenters from catastrophist orthodoxy have lost their jobs, been denied promotion, or subjected to constant harassment and ridicule. This not the way science should be done
Aug 25 2024
3 mins
There's a veritable industry of academics raising alarm about how global warming and a polluted, dying planet will leave humanity and the animal kingdom in such a state that cannibalism will be a matter of survival. I'll spurn schoolyard puns and cheap gags except for one, and that by way of good advice: don't give them a big hand
Aug 09 2024
13 mins
I thought initially that this topic was a bit of fun. But it turns out that entomophagy, as the eating of insects is called, is an essential component of the Western lemmings' race to net-zero. Need it be said that one of the biggest and most enthusiastic lemmings is our very own climate crazies at the CSIRO?
Jul 31 2024
15 mins