Latest news with #Unsettled
Sky News AU
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Australia's climate left won't be able to stand new Trump appointee Steven E. Koonin who dares to question the science around global warming
The climate science establishment is fond of lecturing us about the dangers of rising temperatures. With the return of Donald Trump as US President, however, it is rising scrutiny, not the rising heat, that has them most alarmed. In May, President Trump signed an executive order titled " Restoring Gold Standard Science ," requiring federally funded agencies to ensure their work is accountable, reproducible, and subject to open debate. It was unremarkable in tone, bordering on mundane. Yet the reaction was swift and bitter. The clause insisting that scientists consider dissenting views and protect employees from retaliation for expressing them cuts across the grain. If applied to almost any other field of government-funded research, it would have passed unnoticed. But in the domain of climate science, where agreeing with the so-called consensus is a condition of entry, it was received as heresy. The New York Times, which has followed these developments with increasing concern, reported this week that the Department of Energy had hired three scientists 'well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change'. The three were named as physicist Steven E. Koonin, atmospheric scientist John Christy, and meteorologist Roy Spencer. Mr Koonin, in particular, has been a persistent irritant to the climate establishment, not least because of his credentials. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the first Obama administration, was chief scientist at BP, and before that, provost at Caltech. In 1985, he co-authored one of the first textbooks on computational physics, making him unusually well qualified to assess the limitations of climate models. His 2021 book, 'Unsettled', drew sharp criticism for stating what many others in the field privately acknowledge: that climate modelling remains too immature to offer confident forecasts. 'We don't understand features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required,' he wrote. Greater processing power, he argued, had only increased the range of uncertainty. Mr Koonin's challenge to the mainstream began in 2014 when he convened a workshop of leading climate scientists and physicists to stress-test the prevailing assumptions. He came away unsettled. The distinction between human influences and natural variation was far from clear. Models often contradicted one another. The technical sections of IPCC reports were routinely oversimplified or misrepresented in press releases and summaries. 'In short,' he wrote, 'the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have upon it.' Mr Koonin's claims are plainly stated and extensively sourced. What is striking is not the volume of rebuttal but the absence of any serious attempt to refute them. He has been the target of denunciation, not debate. That in itself tells us something. Exposing the flaws in an argument is the surest way to demonstrate the strength of one's own. Yet the defenders of consensus seem oddly reluctant to try. Instead, they have surrounded themselves with a rhetorical fortress in which disagreement is cast as denial, and scepticism is treated as a threat. Criticism of Mr Koonin has been particularly fierce in Australia. Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith University, accused him of 'feeding climate denial in Australia'. Mr Lowe singled out News Corp (the owner of Sky News Australia) for giving him a platform, along with Fox News in the US. The logic is circular: those who challenge the consensus are said to mislead the public because the consensus is what the public must believe. An invitation to Mr Koonin to speak at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2021 prompted one climate scientist to resign in protest, accusing the lab of undermining science by entertaining views that would confuse the public. The complaint was not about errors in Mr Koonin's work, but the fact of its being heard at all. All this might be less troubling if climate policy were a purely academic concern. But the policies it justifies are costly, coercive, and far-reaching. Hence White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers' statement to the Washington Post last week: 'Future generations should not be expected to forfeit the American Dream to foot the bill of ambiguous climate threats.' The Trump administration's main strategy has been to cut off the stream of funding. The US National Climate Assessment, the flagship government report on global warming, has been quietly shelved. Hundreds of contributors found themselves without contracts, status or support. The Daily Wire reports that the US Global Change Research Program, which oversees the assessment, had a budget of US$4.95 billion in 2025, yet listed just two full-time employees. NASA's climate research has also been trimmed. Michael Mann described the cuts as humiliating. 'It debilitates our standing in the world community,' he said. Zach Labe, formerly of NOAA, put it more bluntly: 'Every day is a train wreck for climate science.' Trump is unlikely to be able to shut down the global warming project entirely. Corporate, philanthropic, academic, and state government funding will ensure that the global warming industrial complex survives. However, by engaging directly with the claims of climate science - rather than fighting a proxy war over energy policy - his administration has changed the terms of the debate. That shift is being felt in Australia too. Scott Morrison's embrace of the 2050 net-zero target brought a welcome cooling in the climate rhetoric. The nuclear debate is important. Yet the risk remains that it distracts from the underlying question: is climate change so dangerous that it warrants radical, expensive, and disruptive intervention? Trump's progress should give Australia's political leaders the courage to stop tiptoeing around the question. Before we discuss the mechanics of decarbonisation, we need an open debate about its justification. Must we not weigh the risks of climate change, such as they are, against the risks to national and economic security posed by over-reaction? Shouldn't we expect the same transparency, contestability, and rigour in climate science that we demand in other areas of public policy? The Trump administration, with the help of Mr Koonin, is determined to decriminalise dissent so that the evidence can be judged on its merits. Its executive order doesn't forbid climate action; it insists that action be justified. If the science is truly settled, it should be able to withstand challenge. That it recoils from scrutiny tells us almost everything we need to know. Nick Cater is a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a regular contributor to Sky News Australia
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Museum to offer free general admission on selected Sundays
The video above is about graffiti art in Dayton. DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – To make art accessible to everyone regardless of financial background, the Dayton Art Institute (DAI) will offer free admission days. The first 'Art For All' Day will be on Sunday, June 1, when the DAI will offer free general admission to all visitors. This special initiative will give guests free access to the collection galleries and the Special and Focus Exhibitions. The museum's patron sponsors, Ramona and Todd Vikan; and supporting sponsors, Eric and Karen Spina, have made this initiative possible. Free summer admission for military families at Dayton Art Institute There will be two more 'Art for All' days on Sunday, August 17 and Sunday, December 7. These days were selected to coincide with major events in DAI's exhibition schedule, which are as follows: June 1 – Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled August 17 – Curtis Barnes, Sr., Dayton Icon December 7 – The Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau from the Chrysler Museum of Art To learn more about the DAI, including current museum hours and updates, click here or call 937-223-4ART (4278). Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Age
20-05-2025
- The Age
This truth-telling book unsettled me, both mentally and physically
But this had to be a consideration through the land itself, to see if it could speak to her, not in any mystical way or intricate pilgrimage but through a simple road trip. Grenville decided to walk on the places her ancestors settled, on the country itself. It might say something. There are roads, she has a car, there are places she can stay. She sets out, neither a pioneer nor a pilgrim, just a woman on a quest. With a car, not a gun. She begins at Wisemans Ferry, a place about an hour's drive from Sydney and named after her ancestor Solomon Wiseman who came as a convict, transported for stealing wood in 1805. In London Wiseman was a man at the bottom of the heap, a man who would never dream of being 'the possessor and master of a piece of earth.' But Wiseman's dreams did, in fact, come true; he took up land, started the ferry, built a pub, made a lot of money. There is a swirl of stories here and Solomon's descendant is sceptical of them all. What? He 'took up' land? Took. Grenville defines the relationship First Peoples had to the land in cool, legal terms: '…the landscape was, and is, the embodiment of a vast and timeless spiritual reality. The identity and meaning of any individual human life is profoundly connected to a particular tract of country and the stories it features. It's more than living on it, more than knowing it, more than being sustained by it, more than loving it, though it's all of those. It's an inextricable, inseparable, existentially vital part of who a person is and where they fit in the cosmos.' For a week Grenville walks through, or across all the places in country NSW she knows are connected to her family; in each place she silently names it as stolen. She doesn't know what to expect, she doesn't in fact, expect anything and often thinks of turning back. She doesn't because something is taking shape, although it could be just the intensifying of her despair. Loading Towards the end of her journey she turns the wheel in the direction of Bingara, nothing to do with her ancestors but everything to do with her journey. Bingara is the town closest to the site of the 1938 Myall Creek Massacre. Descendants of the white men who did the killing and descendants of some of the survivors of those massacred still live here. Grenville finds evidence of something here, could it be openess, on both sides? Or a similar uneasiness that Kim Scott explored in Taboo and Lia Hills in The Desert Knows Her Name? I could have written thousands of words, every one inadequate, about Unsettled. Grenville's pages are streaked with light, with the desire to reach some understanding of the weight of real history as opposed to narrated stories as she walks on and through 'hard places of the spirit' and I thank her for every one of them. She is, like Kim Scott and Lia Hills here and Percival Everett in the US, turning our faces towards the two dazzlingly contemporary questions central to all of us, Colonisation and Race.
Sydney Morning Herald
20-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
This truth-telling book unsettled me, both mentally and physically
But this had to be a consideration through the land itself, to see if it could speak to her, not in any mystical way or intricate pilgrimage but through a simple road trip. Grenville decided to walk on the places her ancestors settled, on the country itself. It might say something. There are roads, she has a car, there are places she can stay. She sets out, neither a pioneer nor a pilgrim, just a woman on a quest. With a car, not a gun. She begins at Wisemans Ferry, a place about an hour's drive from Sydney and named after her ancestor Solomon Wiseman who came as a convict, transported for stealing wood in 1805. In London Wiseman was a man at the bottom of the heap, a man who would never dream of being 'the possessor and master of a piece of earth.' But Wiseman's dreams did, in fact, come true; he took up land, started the ferry, built a pub, made a lot of money. There is a swirl of stories here and Solomon's descendant is sceptical of them all. What? He 'took up' land? Took. Grenville defines the relationship First Peoples had to the land in cool, legal terms: '…the landscape was, and is, the embodiment of a vast and timeless spiritual reality. The identity and meaning of any individual human life is profoundly connected to a particular tract of country and the stories it features. It's more than living on it, more than knowing it, more than being sustained by it, more than loving it, though it's all of those. It's an inextricable, inseparable, existentially vital part of who a person is and where they fit in the cosmos.' For a week Grenville walks through, or across all the places in country NSW she knows are connected to her family; in each place she silently names it as stolen. She doesn't know what to expect, she doesn't in fact, expect anything and often thinks of turning back. She doesn't because something is taking shape, although it could be just the intensifying of her despair. Loading Towards the end of her journey she turns the wheel in the direction of Bingara, nothing to do with her ancestors but everything to do with her journey. Bingara is the town closest to the site of the 1938 Myall Creek Massacre. Descendants of the white men who did the killing and descendants of some of the survivors of those massacred still live here. Grenville finds evidence of something here, could it be openess, on both sides? Or a similar uneasiness that Kim Scott explored in Taboo and Lia Hills in The Desert Knows Her Name? I could have written thousands of words, every one inadequate, about Unsettled. Grenville's pages are streaked with light, with the desire to reach some understanding of the weight of real history as opposed to narrated stories as she walks on and through 'hard places of the spirit' and I thank her for every one of them. She is, like Kim Scott and Lia Hills here and Percival Everett in the US, turning our faces towards the two dazzlingly contemporary questions central to all of us, Colonisation and Race.
ABC News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
What should I read next? April's best books include exciting new work by Kate Grenville and Andrea Goldsmith
Consider that unpleasant feeling of not knowing what to read next fully remedied: in this month's Best Books column, ABC Arts critics recommend their favourite April reads — and there are some rippers. You'll find a love story with a twist, new works from Australian literary heavyweights, a gruesome thriller, and a crime novel where climate change plays a leading role. Unsettled by Kate Grenville Black Inc Grenville won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her novel The Secret River. ( Supplied: Black Inc ) The colony will fall. Have you heard this phrase recently? It came to mind as I read Kate Grenville's latest work of non-fiction. Grenville has previously written several books that take the theft of this continent as their subject. Her most well-known, The Secret River, was a bestseller inspired by an ancestor who settled on the Hawkesbury River. In Unsettled, Grenville confronts, more directly than before, what it means to live on stolen country. She follows her family's stories to the places where they happened, "the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation". Rather than assuming what she should look for, Grenville decides to take things as they come. She will be open, she decides: learning to see patterns does not mean solving a single crime but confronting a series of them. Sometimes, she finds silence. Sometimes, the loss of things that can never be recovered. Intellectual curiosity alone cannot make sense of everything. It cannot account for what to do with the unalterable truth of the violence committed. When you claim land was "taken up", do you deny the theft? Is it a weasel word, an attempt to domesticate all of the violence involved? As Grenville writes, "Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?" Elegantly and simply, Grenville lays out the contours of Australia's theft from her perspective as a descendant of one of the many involved. She practices ways of thinking and living that can make sense, not only of what has been taken, but of what may still be possible. In a continent that often delays confrontation with its colonial history, what happens after the fall? Responsibility for history, Grenville writes, is not always a matter of direct connection or participation: sometimes, one's responsibility is as simple as having benefited from the crime. — Declan Fry Landfall by James Bradley Penguin Landfall is Bradley's eighth work of fiction. ( Supplied: Penguin Books Australia ) A missing child, a noble cop and a race against time: at first glance, Australian writer James Bradley's latest book seems like a bog-standard crime novel. But there's a lot more going on here. Landfall is set in a near-future Sydney where rising sea levels have swallowed parts of the coast. In an area known as the 'Floodline', disadvantaged people live in the top stories of abandoned apartment buildings, improvised jetties providing access in and out. It's from this dystopian nightmare that a six-year-old child, Casey, has disappeared. Photo shows The Book Show Your favourite fiction authors share the story behind their latest books. Sadiya Azad is the detective on the case. A climate refugee herself, Sadiya is determined to find the missing child before a massive cyclone hits the coast. And the odds are stacked against her — she has enemies within the police, her father is ill and a corporation with links to the Floodline is not answering questions. Bradley has done something very clever with Landfall. He entices us in with all the bells and whistles of an unputdownable crime thriller, but then demands that we pay attention and imagine what our country could look like as climate change takes hold. — Claire Nichols The Buried Life by Andrea Goldsmith Transit Lounge Goldsmith's novels include The Prosperous Thief, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2003. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) Adrian Moore is an academic who works on the cultural practices of death — the rituals, the poetry, the gestures and more. And this has nothing, he assures us, to do with the heartbreaking death of his mother when he was very young or the devastating death by suicide of his father a few years later. Nothing. At. All. Nothing to do with his failed relationships or cobwebby house, nothing to do with a certain dissatisfaction or a lack of revelation to his friends. But he is just one character in this novel of delicately interwoven lives. There's also Adrian's friend, Kezi, an artist in her late 20s who has escaped her evangelical family, and longs for some reconnection but has no need to repent or be forgiven. Photo shows Two women with dark hair smiling; one in a pink shirt and gold earrings, with her arm around the other, in a floral shirt Poet Dorothy Porter could take a handful of words and do extraordinary things with them. Her sister celebrates her work in a new memoir. And then, part way through, we encounter a third major character, Laura — a striking, confident, competent town planner, whose verve she somehow ascribes to someone else. We're taken into her worldview, but are also invited to doubt it, at least when it comes to her sense of herself. This spoiler alert is for her, not for the readers: Laura, your husband is awful. As these three characters meet and change each other, we can read their buried and revealed lives on multiple levels at once, which is of course the pleasure of complex fiction. — Kate Evans Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley Text Publishing Consider Yourself Kissed is a literary love story set in East London. ( Supplied: Text Publishing ) Coralie Bower, 29, is a copywriter in a London creative agency but dreams of being a writer. She left Sydney in a cloud of shame and relishes, with a sense of masochism, the anonymity the new city offers her. That is, until she meets Adam, a 37-year-old political journalist and father of one. The meet-cute is dispensed with expeditiously: Coralie fishes Adam's five-year-old daughter, Zora, out of a freezing duck pond in the first chapter. They quickly become an item and when her lease runs out, it makes perfect sense for her to move in with him. They are perfect together — someone even stops them in the street to tell them so. But being perfect together isn't enough. Photo shows Close up photo of Saman Shad in floral jacket with red slipstick and brown hair to the side, smiling slightly with closed mouth. When Saman Shad sat down to write her latest novel, she came up against the challenges of how to find time to write with three small children. Despite her youth and inexperience with children, Coralie quickly takes on a large share of caring for Zora, who she loves. We see Coralie assume more and more of the mental load of their domestic lives, a disparity that grows even larger when she and Adam have two children. Coralie's writing aspirations become a distant memory as Adam's professional life takes precedence. Many readers will find Coralie's struggle to juggle her career with caring responsibilities deeply familiar as she's passed over for a promotion, deemed not committed enough to the job because she leaves early to pick up her children. Australian author Jessica Stanley's 2022 debut novel, A Great Hope, featured a fictitious Labor politician at its centre and her interest in politics is evident here too as general elections and Brexit form a backdrop to Coralie and Adam's everyday lives. A clever and funny rom-com in the vein of Dolly Alderton's Good Material, Consider Yourself Kissed shows how relationships have to change to find an equitable balance for both partners. — Nicola Heath Orpheus Nine by Chris Flynn Hachette Australia Flynn says the premise for Orpheus Nine came to him in a dream. ( Supplied: Hachette Australia ) Brace yourself: this supernatural thriller starts with one of the most shocking scenes I've read in a long time. At an under-10s soccer game in regional Victoria, the kids on the field suddenly stop playing. The children seem stuck to the spot, unable to move, before they all start singing in Latin, in high clear voices. Then — and this is where it gets really awful — their bodies start swelling, filling with salt. Moments later, they're all dead. It turns out this hasn't just happened here. All around the world, every nine-year-old has died in the same gruesome way. And from here on in, it will continue, with every child destined to die the day they turn nine. Photo shows A bald white man wearing a white collared shirt, pictured in front of a bookshelf Is it a virus? Alien invasion? Terrorism? It doesn't really matter. What Belfast-born, Australian-based author Chris Flynn (who says the opening of this book came to him in a dream) is interested in is the impact of this event, known as Orpheus Nine, on the parents left in this small country town. Those who have lost their children are angry and ready to take action. Those whose children survived — because they were 10 or older — feel fated for greatness. And the parents of children about to turn nine are desperate to save them from disaster. Cue the rise of "saltfluencers" — Instagram mums promoting the potentially life-saving benefits of a salt-free diet. Orpheus Nine is bizarre, funny, horrifying and tender. Take a deep breath and read it — you'll be glad you did. — Claire Nichols Good Girl by Aria Aber Bloomsbury Publishing Good Girl is shortlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction. ( Supplied: Bloomsbury Publishing ) Good Girl is a gritty, dark and rich coming-of-age story. Born and raised in the "ghetto-heart" of Berlin, our protagonist Nila feels adrift, unfixed and burdened by shame. When we meet her, Nila is a party girl. Her life is "purgatorial and meaningless": she goes out, drinks, takes drugs and avoids her father. Nila is Afghan yet denies this at every opportunity, claiming, if asked, an ancestry she considers more palatable: Greek or Italian. Her family's experience of trauma, Islamophobia and racism have left Nila fearful and averse to her own identity. Photo shows A young white woman with chin-length red hair wearing black stands side on against a backdrop of green leafy plants The sad girl novel maps the emotional landscape of a generation. When Nila meets Marlowe, an older American writer, and falls in with his friends, she begins to drift even further from herself. Nila calls herself "his loyal stray" and willingly submits to Marlowe both sexually and socially. Fearing that her new friends will smell "the whiff of my poverty and family history" she lies and lies again, forgoing anything left of her Afghan identity. Aria Aber's prose is lush and unflinching, with the visceral descriptions of sweaty clubs and devastating come-downs highlighting her background as a poet. In a literary trope repeated in recent years — younger waifish woman falls for older and richer man — Aber notably brings a new perspective. She unpacks what it means for Nila to be a "good girl". Is it a submissive partner to Marlowe? A pure and honourable Afghan girl for her family? Or the creative and independent artist that she imagines for herself? — Rosie Ofori Ward I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang Scribe Publications Ang is an artist and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Age and Meanjin. ( Supplied: Scribe Publications ) The art leaps out from the first page: in the foreground, a fish head, menacing and skeletal. In the background, shadows hover around a family seated at a table. In Rachel Ang's graphic novel debut, the unsaid, the implicit, the suggested and the hidden all loom as large, if not larger, than what is visible. The book's five stories follow Jenny, a woman stumbling through her late 20s. In the opening story, 'Hunger', Jenny and a co-worker converse. It is clear they are talking around things, that there is something between them. (Playfully, Ang makes this obscurity explicit by drawing obscured speech bubbles.) Their burgeoning romance grows complicated when he reveals a sexual kink to her. Photo shows An illustration of falling books on a beige background with the ABC logo and text reading The ABC Book Club The ABC's place for readers to talk books — with each other, with books specialists from across the ABC, and with your favourite authors. Jenny is someone who knows but does not know, or perhaps does not want to. Seemingly banal conversations and ordinary events often reveal aspects of the characters they might otherwise wish to conceal. In 'The Passenger', Jenny's self-absorption allows her to conceal jealousy toward a defensive ex, both former partners variously ignoring and embarrassing the ex's new one. In the harrowing 'Your Shadow in the Dark', a cousin's trauma manifests in ways that cause Jenny to miss an opportunity to commiserate with her, then finally learn how to begin to. Such ambiguities and suggestive evocations make each narrative more layered than their surfaces may suggest. The final story offers hope for Jenny, as both language and self split and disintegrate in order to create something new. There is movement and dimension to the contours of Ang's black-and-white line art. Their ability to evoke night scenes and darkness is tactile: check out the beautiful rendering of Melbourne's Peel Street in the opening story. Working into each colour's gradations with subtlety and depth, Ang suggests a place where even the shadows have shadows. — Declan Fry Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm Transit Lounge Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) Out of the Woods makes a powerful statement about bones: the bones of men and boys killed in the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. The bones of children and husbands and brothers and friends; the bones of memory, rendered bare by time and memory and scrutiny or lack of it. Bones unearthed, in part, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 2006. Australian novelist, critic and lawyer Gretchen Shirm draws us into the process of bearing witness, through the character of Jess, a woman who has left Sydney behind to work as a judge's assistant at the tribunal. Through this woman's experience, we are given a delicate and thoughtful entrée into important stories of war, into The Hague, and into one woman's life and history, as she becomes more than a conduit for words and translations. Photo shows The Bookshelf Podcast Image The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles. What does it mean that she watches the main defendant and feels some sympathy for his sadness, his sore leg, what she thinks are his kind eyes? What does it mean to make eye contact with this man, who denied holding guns but was part of the bigger-picture organisation? The deeper the story develops, the more we enter into Jess's own life and history: her childhood of poverty and trauma, her love for her son, her tentative relationship with a tall Dutch security guard, with his sweet punning jokes. In between Jess's work and life, there are patches of other text — in a thinner font, stark — of witness testimony, drawn from actual evidence statements from the Tribunal (Shirm herself worked there as a legal intern in 2006). This is a difficult balance, full of ethical and moral decisions — both for the world and for a novelist, an artist — and Shirm handles it beautifully. — Kate Evans Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for and 10am Fridays for .
