Not yet done to death

The latest on the ANU death threats saga is that Australian National University has “stymied” a further FOI request by “demanding” nearly $40,000 to carry out the request.

The latest request is by the same guy whose previous FOI yielded 11 emails for the wrong time period while attempting to either verify or debunk supposed events that, anyway, were based on erroneous reports from the ABC and other outlets (including News £td, a fact that apparently still eludes The Australian).

So far as I can gather, the FOI guy’s motive for pursuing this has been his personal perception that the death-threat reports “have been used as a way to tar all critics of the climate consensus as being a bunch of dangerously unhinged lunatics who would resort to sending death threats...”

Essentially, it offends his vanity that his anti-climate-consensus cause may have been sullied by “a tiny minority of disturbed individuals.” Personally, I can see why ANU would want to discourage FOI requests that verge on the trivial or vexatious.

As a (qualified) supporter of the climate consensus, however, I can report that my own vanity was not offended in the least by a recent report in The Australian by Chris Merritt that prominent climate sceptics had been subject to abuse and threats. I’m happy to allow that there are whackos in any camp.

Nor was I particularly offended that the report, headlined as “Death threats just par for the course,” detailed nothing (in relation to the climate debate) that could seriously be considered a death threat.

The only example that would remotely qualify was an instance where “a filmmaker used Twitter to urge his followers: ‘Let’s assassinate Andrew Bolt.’”

Indeed, that kind of thing is stupid and offensive but nevertheless fairly insubstantial on the threat index, since it’s quite obviously public spleen affected by an identifiable individual.

Merritt also noted,

Sydney Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Blair says he has received “death wishes” rather than death threats. ... Most of this material arrives by email and while they are abusive, Blair says they are not real death threats.

Still, if Merritt and The Australian want to headline all this as “Death Threats,” then all their recent quibbling over the nature of threats to Australian climate scientists would seem somewhat small and hypocritical.

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Argument clinched

QED...

That’s almost three months without any increase in temperature.  This clearly falsifies the theories of climate scientists and means we should ignore anything they say.  If you disagree then please stare without blinking at these lines until it sinks in.

And in case you can’t believe what’s in front of your own eyes, there’s a graph as well...

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The Australian normalises abuse

Non-paying customers visiting The Australian’s website today may read:

Death threats just par for the course
Chris Merritt, Legal affairs editor
June 02, 2012 12:00AM

Death threats and vile abuse are real. They infect the daily lives of key players in the debate over climate change. But it's not what you think: the main recipients of this torrent of abuse are not climate scientists.

Paying customers may read the full article, which is essentially a pious reformulation of Tim Blair’s throwaway line that the odd murder of scientists in Europe “rather puts local claims into perspective.”

In Merritt’s version, those who out-man wimpy Aussie climate boffins are not the dead nuclear scientists in Europe, but intrepid Aussie journos who “are the inheritors of that great tradition in which Western civilisation has encouraged criticism of the orthodoxy in order to expose its flaws.”

These are mostly people who happen to be Merritt’s fellow employees of News £td such as Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair, not to forget his boss Chris Mitchell.

These and others have all been on the receiving end of abusive and threatening approaches from unhinged critics. In a couple of cases, going back a decade or more, there have been assaults and even gunplay.

The key contention in Merritt’s piece is that climate scientists are in fact “players” in the “public policy debate.”

Thus, “The abuse directed at climate scientists, bad as it was, needs to be kept in perspective.”

Well, this is just appalling. Taken to its logical conclusion, Merritt’s reasoning makes those murdered nuclear scientists in Europe “players” in a “public policy debate,” therefore fair game for abusive treatment at the very least.

Rather than quelling the flames of intolerance, Merritt’s piece tends towards normalising abusive and threatening behaviour in public debate.

But what’s at least as bad is that Merritt has equated the role of climate scientists with that of the journalists he’s lionised.

Climate scientists work at producing and interpreting data that informs what is, after all, an orthodoxy — that is, a widely accepted consensus.

By contrast, journalists such as Bolt and Blair work at pushing the envelope, often railing against perceived orthodoxies and sometimes inflaming their readerships to, for instance, promulgate conspiracy theories that demonise and dehumanise the targets of their ire.

In terms of their status as “players” in public policy debate, such ‘journalists’ are several orders of magnitude above scientific workers.

Noting James Delingpole’s complaint about a “run-in with a prickly ABC talk radio host,” ABC managing director Mark Scott observed:

I am sorry that he did not feel that the robust questioning he got on the ABC was the kind of questioning he wanted. But he does present himself as contrary and running against conventional wisdom, and that is what you get.

To extrapolate from that: News £td and its employees need to be much more careful about what they wish for, and what indeed they help enable.

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P.S. Astute readers will note that Merritt in this article has finally conceded for his newspaper that for which it has long been in apparent denial.

Yes folks, there has been “abuse directed at climate scientists,” and it “was bad.”

If only they’d said something like that a couple of weeks ago and maybe even elucidated just a little, it might have saved a lot of tiresome to-and-fro.

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Energy driven II

Alluding to the climate science death threats controversy here in Australia, Tim Blair reckons that the deadly activities of eco-anarchist groups in Europe “rather puts local claims into perspective.”

Thus, if that mother who was sent threats of violence against her children thought she had problems, she should try being actually shot dead. See how she likes that!

You see, those “local claims” are simply an artefact of energy being driven into the climate debate.

Or, as one of Andrew Bolt’s commenters put it, “real-word [sic] robust public scrutiny and criticism” (Wake up Australia of Pennant Hills, Tue 29 May 2012, 10:38am).

So, Australia’s climate boffins need to just STFU and cop it sweet, because their whining is simply driving more and more energy into the climate debate.

They wouldn’t want things to get yet more real-worldy and robusty now, would they?

Al Capone could have put it somewhat more succinctly, but we are after all civilised people here.

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The Australian’s shame over death threat emails

It just goes on and on — an editorial today in The Australian demands: “Correct your errors, Mr Holmes.”

On May 24, the ABC website finally admitted what was reported on The Australian’s front page on May 3 — that emails at the centre of the original story “were found by the Privacy Commissioner to contain abuse, but not overt threats.”

As correctly pointed out by Holmes over a week ago, the emails in question were not “at the centre of the original story” at all; rather, they were garnered from a period a year or more after the incidents which prompted the relocation of ANU staff.

At any rate, one wonders whether The Australian considers it at all significant that ANU people were still evidently receiving abusive emails a year or more after having to be relocated due to threatening incidents.

The Australian, Mr Holmes claimed, “looks worst of all” among the media organisations involved — for enlightening readers with accurate reports that included the full facts about a significant story.

So then, what’s “accurate” about ascribing centrality to a bunch of emails that isn’t warranted by the plain facts. And then headlining that death threat emails had been “debunked”, when there’s been ample credible material published to warrant real concern.

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Scepticism and denialism

Further on the ANU climate-death-threats controversy, The Australian’s legal affairs editor Chris Merritt has today fired off another desperate salvo at the ABC and Media Watch.

He gives voice inter alia to the concerns of a handful of committed campaigning climate sceptics who seem unhappy with the ABC’s continued refusal to demur to the proposition that there were no death threats to any Australian climate scientists ever, period.

I have nothing to add to what I’ve already noted about all this, except to note that the “threatening incidents” towards ANU staff, established as occurring in late-2009 and early-2010, took place in the context of the Copenhagen climate summit of December 2009, culminating in relocation of the ANU staff in February 2010.

Keen observers will recall that time was characterised by somewhat overblown assertions in the populist media regarding the Copenhagen ‘agenda’.  For instance, consider the following from an associate editor of a major Australian metropolitan daily:

To say that Leftist groups are using the global warming scare to further their dreams of world government is not a conspiracy theory but the literal truth...

Note that what was being considered there were draft treaty arrangements for mitigation of what the Australian Government then recognised (and presumably still does) as the most pressing moral challenge of our time.  The world is planted thick with sundry treaty arrangements, from NATO to the European Union to the WTO.

The most-read columnist proceeded to conflate those draft treaty arrangements with conspiracist notions of world government; then served up the reeking confection to a readership primed with his daily rants against Teh Left Who Want to Oppress You; and, moreover, a readership sometimes inhabited by a minority but vocal lunar fringe.

Fast forward to today and one finds that one of most strident and venomous critics of the ANU death threats “smear” is that very same most-read columnist.

Well, who could blame someone for being in denial about having unwittingly helped feed something so ugly?

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Energy driven

On ABC TV’s Media Watch last night, Jonathan Holmes made a sterling attempt to unravel the controversy over alleged death threats to climate scientists in Australia.

It’s much as I suspected: A concatenation and endless loop of misreporting, claim, counter-claim, self-righteous indignation, partisan posturing, etc.

From the material presented by Holmes and the Media Watch team there can be no doubt that a number of climate scientists in Australia have been subjected to abusive and threatening approaches — whether by email or other means — by some of the more unhinged exponents of climate ‘scepticism’.

Yet some prominent and even not-so-prominent mass-bloggers are still in denial on that point. Andrew Bolt still wants the story to be about who said what to whom and when. He simply can’t let it go because he has for many weeks now invested so much of his credibility into ratchetting up the invective to the nth.

Meanwhile, Bolt’s stablemate at News £td, Tim Blair has summed up Holmes' efforts thus:

In the short term, yep, a win for Holmes. But in the long term, warmies have never understood how much energy these evidence-avoiding tactics drive into the climate debate.

That’s kind of an interesting formulation: Abuse and threats resolved as “energy driven into the climate debate.”

Well, after all, this is the guy whose response to an actor’s public fantasising about shooting a journalist was to entertain the actor over drinky-poos.

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O brave new climate!

For his final TV show of the year, Andrew Bolt had tantalisingly promised his followers “a mention of Tim Flannery.”

So naturally I had to tune in, hoping for his sake he wasn’t going to run with Bunyip’s failed gotcha on Flannery, to which he’d given such prominence on his blog. In the event, he took a somewhat different angle. Phew!

Bolt sought to ease our Flannery-inflamed anxieties by emphasising three points. (See youtube video. Note: creepy presenter warning.)

First,

• With the expected increase in Australia’s population this century, you’ve got to expect some increase in the number of “weather-related deaths” anyway.

True enough so far as it goes, and we eagerly await the release of Doctor Easychair’s study into what the actual real numbers will be.

Second,

• The “death estimate” presupposes the world warming by “an incredible four and a half degrees this century, when it hasn’t actually warmed for the last decade.”

The supposed absence of warming over the last decade to which he refers is, of course, a recurring fancy of climate change ‘sceptics’ everywhere.

Also noteworthy is that the study he refers to, published in 2008^* (way before Flannery was appointed to the Climate Commission), actually considers various public health outcomes, aside from ‘death estimates’, across a range of scenarios.

For his third point, Bolt quoted a snippet from that study:

This assessment does not quantify the extent to which future adaptation to climate change will modify the levels of death...

The document itself continues,

..., injury and ill-health for each health outcome. It will be difficult to make confident quantitative assumptions about the potential adaptive consequences...

“Difficult”? Not for our Doctor Easychair, who confidently gushes his third point:

• “This death estimate comes from researchers who admit they didn't allow for us getting richer and smarter, so much better able to adapt to the new climate. You know, being able to afford better cures, better disease prevention. Cheaper air conditioning!”

Yay, we’re saved!

While we eagerly await the details of Doctor Easychair’s confident quantitative assumptions about our adaptation to this “new climate” — which he may or may not believe in anyway, who can say? — still the prospect of unspecified cures and cheaper air conditioning is welcome relief after all that scary stuff.

And it’s not unreasonable to expect Doctor Easychair will next solve other problems such as war, famine, and... oh, let’s throw in cold fusion and teleportation.

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* Garnaut Climate Change Review, June 2008, “The impacts of climate change on three health outcomes: temperature-related mortality and hospitalisations, salmonellosis and other bacterial gastroenteritis, and population at risk from dengue.” Available as PDF document from the Garnaut Review website.

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UPDATE

Yep. Andrew Bolt really does believe it’s all about him. On a video of a discussion between Robert Manne and Tim Flannery, he observes:

I’m mentioned so often by the two alarmists that I wonder why they didn’t simply invite me along to have the debate they’d promised.

Promised debate?

Latrobe University, which hosted the event on August 12 this year, billed it as “A Conversation between Tim Flannery and Robert Manne.”

It’s the youtube hosted version (posted, it says, 1 day ago) that for some reason titles it as “Robert Manne vs. Tim Flannery,” with the description, “Robert Manne debates Tim Flannery.”

Anyway, I had to wait 17 minutes for the first mention of Bolt (17:27), then 23 min (40:10) during which Greg Sheridan came up (33:58). Then he was mentioned once during the Q/A where Manne imagined a hypothetical debate between Bolt and Phillip Adams (1:07:55).

So that’s three very brief mentions in over 80 minutes. None of those mentions related to any particular point of science because the focus of the conversation was on Flannery’s role in communicating his brief as Climate Commissioner.

Manne and Flannery did have a number of points of difference, but they maintained the discussion in a spirit of civility (so often missing in political discourse, so Bolt is always saying).

It’s a pity our Doctor Easychair only has ears for himself, because he’d seem to have missed out on hearing a thoughtful, wide-ranging discussion.

Why wasn’t he invited? I guess because it was intended as a thoughtful, wide-ranging discussion.

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Bunyip’s failed Flannery gotcha

The Australian government’s Climate Commission this week released a controversial report projecting “impacts of climate change on the health of Australians.”

The report was launched by Chief Commissioner Tim Flannery, which was duly reported in The Australian. From among the report’s projections, the paper reported:

Without international action on climate change to limit temperature rises to [2 degrees celsius], the number of predicted temperature related deaths in Australia is predicted to rise from just over 6000 in 2020 to about 10,000 in 2070.

Admirably taking this statement with a sceptical grain of salt, blogger Professor Bunyip armed himself with “a pocket calculator and a copy of some recent Bureau of Statics [sic] projections” to set about testing the Climate Commission’s predictions.

In 2020, according to the ABS, Australia will be home to some 30 million people, of which Flannery insists roughly 6000 will be carried off by dengue fever and other curses that thrive in the heat. By 2070, the same ABS projection posits a likely population of between 46 million and 54 million, depending on which curve you choose to track.

So let’s see how that works out: 6000 deaths per 30 million means a 1-in-5000 chance of being done in by nasty weather as of 2020.

And 10,000 deaths in a 2070 population of 54 million? Well that comes in at 1-in-5400 climate casualties.

So the warmer it is, at least by Flannery’s reckoning, the safer and healthier we will be.

Neat... except Bunyip has made a couple of erroneous assumptions — one trivial, and one that’s somewhat more serious.

Trivially, he attributes the “reckoning” to Tim Flannery, when in fact the report’s authors are Lesley Hughes and Tony McMichael. (Hughes is a commissioner with the Climate Commission, and head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University. McMichael is professor of population health at Australian National University.) True, Flannery as Chief Commissioner did launch the report, but the centrality attributed to Flannery by Bunyip and his fellow travellers is about an agenda.

More serious, however, is Bunyip’s simplistic (albeit pocket calculator-friendly) assumption that the health-related effects of hotter temperatures will be linearly uniform across Australia.

Whereas the modelling from Hughes & McMichael is somewhat more complex:

Under a worst-case scenario, unmitigated climate change may modestly reduce temperature-related deaths in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and NSW . . . but deaths could increase markedly in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

That’s an actual quote from the report that was in the article Bunyip relied upon for the above, so he has no excuse other than agenda-driven zeal.

So, Bunyip will need to factor into his calculations some sort of inverse differential between Qld/NT and the other states and territories, based on population projections for each, factoring in some assumptions about relative risk in each, etc. etc. etc.

The take-home message of Bunyip’s foolishness is that modelling of complex systems is ... well, complex ... and requires somewhat more than a pocket calculator and an agenda.

Oh, and beware when someone like fact-averse Andrew Bolt thinks well of you.

UPDATE 06/12

Bunyip has rebutted my remarks here in an update to his post, in which I’ve been soundly bitch-slapped, had my arse ass handed to me on a plate, whilst simultaneously having it kicked, on my way out the door. That’s fixed my little red wagon, yessah, and I won’t be dragging my arse ass back in a sling for more, nossah!

Kidding. He called me some names and had a little whine about standards.

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Andrew Bolt pays “very great respect indeed”

And why would he not, when the payees are three actual scientists who have aligned themselves with his crankish views on climate science?

Bolt’s dubious praise is actually a petulant expression of spleen in response to a feisty defence of orthodox climate science by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb.

From the outset Bolt refuses to dignify Chubb with the title ‘Professor’, referring to Chubb simply as ‘Mr Chubb’ in the heading of his post.

He then introduces a video of his interview with his three tame scientists with the following:

... here’s a video of me paying very great respect indeed to three scientists who do agree with Chubb on one thing — that scientists like them are indeed treated with contempt, but not by the people Chubb means ...

Yep, “vewwy gweat wespect indeed” — that ought to fix Perfessor Chubb’s little red wagon.

Well then, what did Professor Chubb say to provoke such a puerile, tongue-poking performance from our good Doctor Easychair? Perhaps it was this bit:

[Chubb] also attacked “entertainers” in the media who had the privilege of an audience but not the responsibility to go with it. “For many in the media and politics and for the plethora of so-called commentators, undermining science is becoming an increasingly popular pastime,” he said.

Note that Chubb wasn’t specifically referring to Bolt as one of those ‘entertainers’, but — since clearly everything’s about him — Bolt has clearly taken to heart what he regards as a stinging jibe.

Notwithstanding his doomed efforts at fact-based commentary — which sadly requires a competent grasp of actual facts — I do hope Doctor Easychair comes to realise what an honourable thing is the role of entertainer in our lives.

On this blog alone, his endearing antics have been the subject of around two dozen out of 800-plus over almost 6 years. And his contribution to the wider blogging community is inestimable.

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Pell asserts his authority in stuffology

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney has rebuffed the director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Dr Greg Ayers, as “unscientific”.

Last month Dr Ayers told a Senate estimates hearing that a submission on climate science by Cardinal Pell was heavily based on Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth, which has been soundly discredited.

Ayers (a BSc and PhD from Monash University) has now been dismissed by Pell (who played a lot of football for Corpus Christi College) as “obviously a hot-air specialist.”

Pell continued,

“I've rarely heard such an unscientific contribution... I regret when a discussion of these things is not based on scientific fact. I spend a lot of time studying this stuff.”

Readers may judge for themselves the quality of Ayers’ critique of the Pell-Plimer creed from the transcript reproduced here, but the opinion of this humble blogger is that it was chock-full of scientific stuff, in contrast to Pell’s lame rhetoric above.

Both climate ‘sceptics’ and committed Catholics should ask Cardinal Pell, as gently as possible and with all due respect, to please stop making a jackass out of himself and them.

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Andrew Bolt’s dodgy fundamentals

Andrew Bolt has today posed a couple of questions about the Gillard Government’s carbon ‘pricing’ plan that I’d have liked to have seen him ask John F. Kennedy in 1962:

There are two fundamental questions journalists never ask the Kennedy administration about its mad scheme to put a man on the moon.

They’re the two questions we’d ask whether buying an Electrolux vacuum cleaner or a Pontiac.

One, how much will this cost?

Two, how well will it work?

Actually there are some further fundamental questions the average shopper would probably ask, around costs-benefits and the like.

Of course, there are technological developments and innovations that would almost certainly flow from Kennedy’s, or indeed any, grand initiative. These were unquantifiable, of course, when Kennedy announced his grand vision in 1962 but are readily identifiable today.

The thing is, of course, that Bolt’s equivalence of the Gillard Government’s carbon pricing initiative with the mundane purchase of consumer goods is utterly simplistic and, well, just plain dumb.

If he’d have put that equivalence to Jill Duggan of the European Commission’s Directorate General of Climate Action, whom he lambastes in the above column for not answering his dodgy “two fundamental questions”, she might have been able to set him straight — failing which, you’d have to think maybe she really was clueless.

Unfortunately Prime Minister Gillard probably lacks the gravitas to convincingly deliver the Kennedy line about “we do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard...”

. . . because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

And it may be recalled that Kennedy, in his election campaigning, did not categorically say he would not put a man on the moon.

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Plimer encouraged

Not only does Cardinal George Pell believe in the Virgin Birth, he also believes nitrogen is a greenhouse gas.

The Cardinal’s latter error is perhaps inevitable, since he’s apparently invested a lot of faith in Professor Ian Plimer’s ‘anti-warming’ tract Heaven and Earth, which is not known for its veracity.

It’s all come out in Senate committee hearings, in which Dr Greg Ayers of the Bureau of Meteorology has felt obliged to make a statement to provide balance in response to the Plimer-Pell creed. Tim Lambert has background and details.

One of the highlights is Greens Senator Scott Ludlam’s suggestion that, if Plimer desires a right of reply to Ayer’s statement, “He can publish another work of science fiction.”

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Back to profligacy

Yesterday morning I was extremely concerned there might be something, well, not right with the climate."

By this morning it would seem I was being somewhat of an alarmist.

We are now able to drive to the Fountain Gate Shoppingdrome without hindrance, so the world is again as it should be in the best of all possible worlds.

Humans: 1

Nature: 0

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End of times approaches

This is freaking me out.

The Telstra guy told us he’d never seen the intersection of Beaconsfield Ave, Kenilworth Ave and Soldiers Rd, Beaconsfield, under water in all the twelve years he’s lived in the district.

There’s something . . . um. . . not right with the climate.

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Copernicus lives?

Well, no... but we may be hearing more from him at any rate.

Asked yesterday whether he ‘believes’ in the science behind anthropogenic climate change, Senator Barnaby Joyce replied:

I never believed the science is settled. If the science was settled, Copernicus would be dead. [...thinks for a second...] Sorry, he is dead — he would have been killed!

It’s fairly certain Barnaby never really thought Copernicus was still alive.

But historians of science will await with keen anticipation Barnaby’s revelations concerning the hitherto unknown contribution of Copernicus to climate science.

And how that great scholar would have been killed for it, presumably by rogue bands of climate scientists who felt threatened by the new Copernican climatology.

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Incomprehensibility understandable, says climate boffin

“In many important ways the climate system is moving near the upper limits of our understanding and indeed our model predictions. That’s understandable because emissions are moving towards the upper limits as well.”

• Professor Will Steffen
  executive director
  ANU Climate Change Institute

Godley & Creme, Consequences (1977) — album art detail

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Toora-li-additty 2

As previously noted, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) recently refused a housing development at Toora, on the South Gippsland coast, due to the ‘probability’ of flooding arising from climate-change induced sea-level rise.

A ‘climate change adaptation specialist’, Dr Peter Fisher, in an opinion piece last week observed with regard to the Toora decision:

Curiously, [VCAT] did not invoke a similar precautionary approach when it refused to overturn planning approval for a gas plant upgrade near Marlo. The proposed residential development at Toora was apparently more risky than the processing and storage of liquid hydrocarbons and monoethylene glycol on a low dune next to a lagoon on a flood plain with only frontal dunes between the plant and the ocean.

Curious indeed; however, such inconsistency could be illumined by the fact that one proposal was underpinned by a significant commercial lobby, whereas the other clearly was not.

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Toora-li-additty

click to enlarge  —  imarge by jarcob

It seems global climate change and sea-level rise are imminently upon us.

The threat of rising sea levels has persuaded a tribunal to refuse a housing development in South Gippsland.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal said it was “reasonably foreseeable” that climate change would affect the allotments, which could be flooded and storm-damaged.

It is believed to be one of the first cases in Australia where climate change has been given as a reason to refuse a coastal development.

The VCAT decision apparently makes no assertions on whether climate change is anthropogenic, or human-induced, but it does lean heavily on the authority of “the preliminary view of CSIRO scientists that the Grip Rd area of coastline near Toora would experience storm surges and potential flooding.” (My emphasis)

click to enlarge  —  image source google maps streetview

This blog knows of at least one family who’ve bought a small acreage in the ‘affected’ area with a view to building a home there. The VCAT decision renders their existing planning permit null and void, leaving them with a marginal agricultural-zoned allotment which may be good for ... agisting horses?

One would think that building a residential dwelling, on land that may theoretically be subject to flooding at some future date, is a matter solely undertaken at the owners’ risk.

Of course, there are wider issues and downstream consequences of allowing exceptions in this case. But what are such people now to do with land acquired expressly for a given purpose, which has now been scotched by administrative fiat?

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Tri-Millennial event celebrated

It’s been asserted that the recent 15-day heatwave in Adelaide, South Australia, is only likely to happen once every 3,000 years.

Adelaide’s residents will now have something notable about their city to tell their grandchildren that doesn’t involve serial homicide.

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