Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg says energy deal is close

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is confident of striking a deal with the states on a national plan to merge climate and energy policy, but remains adamant he won't yield to demands by some Labor states to raise emission reduction targets.

Josh Frydenberg, Minister for Environment and Energy.

The nation’s energy ministers will meet at a Council of Australian Governments meeting on Friday to thrash out the future of the federal government’s national energy guarantee (NEG), and are expected to agree to move on to the final design stage of a deal.

Mr Frydenberg was the last of the COAG leaders to arrive for a pre-gathering dinner on Thursday night at Cecconi's, an up-market Italian restaurant on Melbourne's Flinders Lane.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story from The Age - “Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg says energy deal is close.”

Don’t shoot the climate change messenger.

Today, when our weather forecasters tell us a heatwave is coming, we can be quietly confident of the time it will arrive and the temperatures that will be reached. When western Sydney broke records on January 7, hitting 47 degrees, the Bureau of Meteorology had warned us, enabling individuals and organisations to prepare. While analysis of this event is ongoing, researchers at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence on Climate Extremes found a similar Sydney heatwave last year was twice as likely due to the climatic impacts of humans.

Once thriving wetlands close to the Murray River at Mildura in north-west Victoria.

The role of forecasting is to use the best information available at the time to predict conditions, and give us time to prepare, adjust or change course. When we're talking about tomorrow's, or even next week's, weather everyone plans accordingly, without a second thought. Using seasonal forecasts, based on predictions of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), industries and governments routinely respond months in advance to forecast patterns of rainfall and wind.

Read the story from The Sydney Morning Herald - “Don’t shoot the climate change messenger.”

Climate change is easily understood, denial comparatively complex

Anne Manne helps us
understand something
about denial.

The equations that lead to climate change and relatively simply and subsequently understandable, but the intellectual gymnastics that result in denial are so complex they escape logic and reason.

The Monthly has discussed that denial and its reason in a story headed: “Confident white males – and other profiles of denialism”.

Author, Anne Manne opened with the thought: “The ‘facts’ on climate change could not be clearer” and ended her discussion saying conservative, white males are three times more likely to be denialists, noting that they are technophobes who see a technological fix consistent with preserving the life of the consumer as deeply appealing.