It’s personal: The only way the Abbott v Turnbull vendetta will end

Sky News should have issued a trigger warning this week, ahead of its broadcast of NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly, in which the member for Hughes refused to rule out a Tony Abbott comeback.

Tony Abbott and Josh Frydenberg, left, shared more common ground in 2015.

A simple "some viewers may find this content distressing" across the ticker at the bottom of the screen would have sufficed - because hasn't the former prime minister put us through enough? Abbott's bonkers speech to Global Warming Policy Foundation in London this week was the most embarrassing thing an Australian has done in Britain since Shane Warne … well, since Shane Warne.

Abbott, ever the Jesuit, parsed his breezy, idiosyncratic summary of the crapness of climate science, all in terms of religion, natch. We live in a post-Christian world, he said, and climate science is the new religion, but it's also like a primitive cult because carbon abatement measures are akin to the goats the pre-Christian savages used to sacrifice to the volcano gods.

The goat-sacrifice metaphor, poking fun at loincloth barbarians, had a faintly colonial whiff that felt intellectually borrowed from Prince Philip, the Queen-husband and Abbott-anointed Australian knight who represents everyone who still doesn't understand why Little Black Sambo has been banned in schools.

Read the comment in today’s Melbourne Age by Jacqueline Malley - “It’s personal: The only way the Abbott v Turnbull vendetta will end.”

Sex lives of reptiles could leave them vulnerable to climate change

Bearded dragons can be genetically male
but look like and function as females.

We are only just starting to appreciate the full sexual diversity of animals. What we are learning is helping us understand evolution and how animals will cope with a changing world.

In humans and other mammals, sex chromosomes (the Xs and Ys) determine physical sex. But in reptiles, sometimes sex chromosomes do not match physical sex. We call this “sex reversal”.

Environmental factors such as temperature can trigger sex reversal in reptiles. In our recent study, we investigated how common sex reversal is in reptiles. We concluded that it is widespread and a powerful evolutionary force.

This raises important questions about how reptiles will survive in a warming world.

Read the CSIRO blog - “Sex lives of reptiles could leave them vulnerable to climate change.”