Bjorn Lomborg's bid for an Australian home ends abruptly

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jorn Lomborg’s bid to find an Australian home has come to an abrupt end. The Turnbull government has withdrawn the promised A$4 million in funding that the former Abbott government committed to Lomborg’s proposed Australia Consensus Centre after Lomborg was unable to find an Australian university to host him.

Writing in The Australian two weeks ago, in a second defence of his proposed centre this year, Lomborg took issue with my previous article in The Conversation. In it, I pointed to an NTEU document introduced at a Flinders University Council meeting in August that alleged 14 out of 42 Australian universities had rejected hosting the controversial climate change inactivist. The most distinctive feature of Lomborg’s opinion piece is that he did not deny the fact that so many Australian universities had rejected his centre.

Read the piece by Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, David Holmes, on The Conversation - “Farewell to Lomborg – what did the episode teach us?”

David Holmes puts Karl Marx and climate change together

Karl Marx.

Karl Marx and climate change might seem unrelated.

However, the Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, David Holmes has put them together.

Writing on The Conversation in March this year, Holmes said: “Given the efforts around the world to discredit climate change science as a “socialist plot”, it is worth looking not at the relationship of socialist states to climate change, but to foundational socialist thinker Karl Marx”.

Holmes’ article was headed: "Karl Marx and climate change”.

Imagining a nebulous 'thing'

Climate change for most people is a nebulous thing.

One bomb caused this massive devastation
at Hiroshima - climate change is releasing
the equivalent amount of energy every day.

It cannot be touched, felt, smelt or seen, except for when we are visited by an extreme weather event, and rarely is that ever attributed directly to climate change, rather just a “nasty turn in the weather”.

A senior lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, David Holmes, set out to conclude how we imagine climate change.

His finding, or at least a report on his work, appears today on The Conservation in a story headed: “Four Hiroshima bombs a second: how we image climate change”.

The headline was for impact and to harness a reader’s attention.

Holmes certainly achieved his aim, but then a story on Climate Progress headed: “16 of your favourite things that climate change is totally screwing up”, reduced the conversation to more day-to-day matters.

The demise of those “favourite things” are what will really make people take notice.