Now that climate change is irrefutable, denialists like Andrew Bolt insist it will be good for us.

There was a battered paper cartoon pasted to our office cupboard, sometime back in the year 2000. It depicted a landscape of power plants belching smoke, in the foreground of which was a billboard where an enthusiastic woman in a sunhat sipped a margarita through a straw. A speech bubble came from the woman’s lipsticked mouth: “Global warming?” she gushed. “I can’t wait!”

It was supposed to be a joke.

‘Flames literally surround the city in which the
 Australian prime minister announced ‘resilience and a
daptation’ will substitute for climate mitigation.’ 

Memory of that cartoon provoked an old, nihilistic laugh to echo in my throat at a confluence of climate events this week, 20 careless years later. Dear world, three months after they began, the Australian fires are not out. Today, ash is raining in our nation’s capital, orange flames stare over the mountains behind Canberra. Scientific consensus, affirmed by Australia’s exhausted fire chiefs, is that the fires are effects of the anthropogenic climate crisis. And yet even as the fires roar at the physical gates of power, on Sunday the conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, of the Murdoch press, published an insistence that climate change is “overall, a good thing”. The only thing missing from this new cartoon is the lipstick.

Read the story from The Guardian by Val Badham - “Now that climate change is irrefutable, denialists like Andrew Bolt insist it will be good for us.”