‘We've turned a corner': farmers shift on climate change and want a say on energy

Out in the bush, far from the ritualised political jousting in Canberra, attitudes are changing. Regional Australia has turned the corner when it comes to acknowledging the reality of climate change, says the woman now charged with safeguarding the interests of farmers in Canberra.

 Fiona Simson on climate change: ‘Farmers have
 come quite a long way in their attitude.’

Fiona Simson, a mixed farmer and grazier from the Liverpool plains in northern New South Wales, and the president of the National Farmers’ Federation, says people on the land can’t and won’t ignore what is right before their eyes. “We have been experiencing some wild climate variability,” Simson tells Guardian Australia’s politics podcast. “It’s in people’s face”.

Read Katharine Murphy’s story from The Guardian - “‘We've turned a corner': farmers shift on climate change and want a say on energy.”

Scientists are copying US climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump's choice to head the
 Environmental Protection Authority, is one of
 several appointments of climate change sceptics
that have alarmed the scientific community. 

Washington: Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.

The efforts include a "guerrilla archiving event" in Toronto where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbour scientific information.

"Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you'd want to hedge against," said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a non-government server, where it will remain available to the public.

"Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we're planning for that."

Read Brady Dennis’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Scientists are copying US climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.”