Perhaps we need to explain climate change to politicians as we would to very small children

When I was an undergrad learning geology, the maxim that was thumped into me wasn’t how to build a mine or drill for oil and gas, it was simply: “The present is the key to the past.” The thing that took a while to accept was that the past was really, really, long.

The more heat-absorbing gases in the
atmosphere, the greater the impact.
 It’s really not rocket science, simply
Earth science.

It’s hard to comprehend the scale of geologic time: the timespan for continents to crash together and rip apart, for tiny sea creatures to live, die and condense into kilometres of limestone, or streams to carve epic canyons carrying mountains to the sea. We use comparisons our minds can grasp, such as if all cosmological time was the length of string or compressed into a single year (humans beings appear in the final six hours).

But kids deal with billions of years without a problem – 64 billion is my son’s favourite number. So, when I explained geologic time to my children as we travelled to the last students’ climate rally in Melbourne, they got it: geologically, things happen slowly. And yes, there are exceptions, volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes, to name but a few, but I am talking about the fundamental processes: mountain building, sediment creating, climate changing kind of processes.

Read the opinion piece from The Guardian by Emma White - “Perhaps we need to explain climate change to politicians as we would to very small children.”

On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming

It was a typical November day in New York City. The year: 1959. Robert Dunlop, 50 years old and photographed later as clean-shaven, hair carefully parted, his earnest face donning horn-rimmed glasses, passed under the Ionian columns of Columbia University’s iconic Low Library. He was a guest of honor for a grand occasion: the centennial of the American oil industry. 

Physicist Edward Teller pointing at a formula on a blackboard on 22 May 1968.

Over 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, and industry executives were present for the Energy and Man symposium – organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business – and Dunlop was to address the entire congregation on the “prime mover” of the last century – energy – and its major source: oil. As President of the Sun Oil Company, he knew the business well, and as a director of the American Petroleum Institute – the industry’s largest and oldest trade association in the land of Uncle Sam – he was responsible for representing the interests of all those many oilmen gathered around him.

Read the The Guardian US story by Benjamin Franta - “On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming.”