The religiously  inclined were, and some remain, rather keen on relics of the saints. In our modern age a similar and no less devout reverence afflicts those obsessed with the secular, Phar Lap's heart and Einstein's brain making the point

So you think carbonphobics fall into only two categories: useful idiots who fret loudly about a non-existent threat and careerists happy to whip up the scare stories that keep their grants coming. Well, there is a third set of snouts in the trough -- bankers and 'green fund' managers. Hold on to your wallet

Infused with hot air and baked in a two-degree oven, this is a dish much favoured by carbon-credit peddlers, careerist bureaucrats and settled scientists lacking the teeth to leave their mark on the red meat of more substantial enquiry

Australia has signed on to the latest and expanded list of climate goals, a pledge celebrated at the world body's New York headquarters with a luncheon of re-cycled "food that would have ended up in garbage bins" -- a repository many might regard as appropriate for the agreement itself

Unlike the dog that didn't bite, the mystery facing Baker Street's most irregular detective concerned those yelping warmists who howl doom at the slightest provocation, even the contradictory variety. More ice around an allegedly melting ice cap? Clearly, Watson, they are a rum lot

Not since the Affair of the Politician, the Water Closet and the Trained Cormorant had the great detective faced such a mystery: what became of the notional $80 billion stolen from schoolchildren of tender years to advance the evil ends of Prime Minister Tony Moriarty?

Summoned from his slumber by the cries of academic freedom and integrity being tortured and dispatched at the University of Western Australia, the ghost of Socrates had a few pointed things to say. After that he asked for his statue (left) be removed from campus

They tinker with their computer models and hand down oracular pronouncements on atmospheric events 100 years hence, never troubled by self-doubt nor annoying queries from congregants in the media choir. Like Islam, if science is to be reformed, look to the heretics

What is it about climate change that brings out the nuts and fruitcake theories? We all know it will never rain again in Tim Flannery's parallel universe, and now we learn that bestowing feminine names, or merely feminine-sounding ones, on hurricanes makes them so much more deadly