Essay by Eric Worrall
Adam Gottschalk, a freshly minted Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, lamenting the lack of urgency in addressing climate change.
I start my first job as the world careers and threatens what enriches my life
By Adam Gottschalk FEBRUARY 18, 2024
This essay is about beginning a career at this time, in this climate.
I am 21 years old and a university student. It is 2023, early autumn. I am starting my first office job. It’s a government job: a short-term, part-time internship in the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (a long name with a clumsy acronym, “DCCEEW”).
DCCEEW is doing important work. My team assists the financial sector to redirect capital towards activities that benefit biodiversity. They call these activities “nature-positive”.
Everyone in my team is positive about nature.
It is the middle of winter and I am reading an article by one of Australia’s leading climate scientists which says, basically, that because of the El Nino event just begun, the Great Barrier Reef could die this year.
This year.
…
It is the end of winter and I am going to Lady Elliot Island tomorrow with my dad. Wikipedia tells me that Lady Elliot is the southernmost coral cay of the Great Barrier Reef. It has waters that are “particularly rich in sea life”.
…
If there is anything I wish more people understood, it is this urgency. It hangs over all.
…
Later, as our plane banks away from the island, I see a whale surface, glisten, blow. The water sprays up, then the whale sinks below.
Adam Gottschalk is an Anne Kantor Fellow at the Australia Institute in 2024. He holds a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics and a Bachelor of Arts (Environmental Studies) from The Australian National University.
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/i-start-my-first-job-as-the-world-careers-and-threatens-what-enriches-my-life-20231204-p5eoxt.html
For starters Adam, I’d like to compliment you on your writing style, it’s impressively clear and expressive. Perhaps titles like author, politician or journalist will feature in your future?
But there is a reason why when brutal dictators want foot soldiers for their great societal transformation or cultural revolution, they pick young people to be the vanguard of their movement. Young people tend to take things literally, and accept what they are told by authority figures at face value. Young people haven’t developed a lifetime habit of always questioning what they are told.
The Great Barrier Reef is in no danger of dying, at most it will change location a little. The reef is composed of an organism which has survived for at least 200 million years, through unimaginably catastrophic global extinction events and disasters, including the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs.
The reason that coral is so good at surviving great upheavals is that while adult coral is immobile, coral spawn is immensely mobile.
Every so often corals spawn. Corals produce immense clouds of microscopic eggs and sperms, which germinate into highly mobile microscopic coral larvae which seek out new places to colonise.
The Great Barrier Reef itself has moved location countless times over the millennia, the reef has only been at its current location for a few thousand years. Some Australian shorelines are composed of coral which lived thousands of years ago, during the Holocene Optimum, when the sea level was significantly higher than today. The Great Barrier Reef had and has no trouble changing location when climate change impacts sea conditions, such as when the world cooled after the end of the Holocene Optimum, and the sea waters retreated to today’s level.
And in fact, Australian coral coverage hit a record high a record high in 2022 – as an organism which is responsive to conditions, coral cover fluctuates wildly when conditions change.
I’m not accusing the scientist who you think told you the reef would die this year of lying, but I am suggesting you need to do more research, so you can form a more complete picture of what is really happening.
I wish you luck. Someone with your talent for writing has an immense opportunity to do some good for the world. Please do your utmost to do your research, and don’t just take people’s word for it – make sure you gather all the facts, and form your own conclusions, before committing your pen to changing the world with your ideas.
Oh and please don’t feel guilty about that aeroplane trip to Lady Elliot Island. That island is difficult to reach by means other than air travel, though in 2017 a drug courier on a jet ski made an impressive attempt to bypass the usual transport options.
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“….article by one of Australia’s leading climate scientists….” says it all. When will people realize that the term “climate scientist” is misused?
Adam Gottschalk is an Anne Kantor Fellow at the Australia Institute in 2024. He holds a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics and a Bachelor of Arts (Environmental Studies) from The Australian National University.
….leading climate scientists…. Why I wonder..? 😀
It seems that “climate science” is now an oxymoronic term. Much like military intelligence when I serve my stint in a Army.
“My team assists the financial sector to redirect capital towards
activities that benefit biodiversity.the DAVOS dandies e.g. George Soros and his gang of Faceless Cultural Elites to enrich their private holdings by redirecting middle class wealth through Government Regulations and taxation under the guise of avoiding global doom.”There. Fixed it.
This poor brainwashed college Indoctrinate has no idea the damage he is doing to freedom and individual liberty around the globe as he helps pad the wealth of the Global Elites and further subjugates the individual to their Elite Central Authority. Heil DAVOS!
I have repeatedly commented that there is strictly speaking no such thing as a “climate scientist” in the same sense that we have trained scientists who majored in biology or chemistry, geography or geology, physics or oceanography etc but also utilize mathematics, statistics etc. The study of climate, is better described as a
“multidisciplinary study.”
How many, who call themselves “climate scientists,” have majored in even a single one of the scientific disciplines involved in understanding climate? How many have more than a superficial knowlege of mathematics, statistics and computer programming? Perhaps they have taken a selection from a pile of claims from these scientific disciplines without being able to critically evaluate their validity and relevance to climate change? This is why folk with a solid foundation in say chemistry or physics can pick holes in the reasoning of these expert “climate scientists” who respond in telling them they are not “climate scientists.”
QED
😉
All of the young folks I know with degrees in “Environmental Science” have a BA, not a BS because they did not need math and real science classes. One is even working on a doctorate with no math requirement.
My experience of young folk with degrees, is there is no requirement for English either.
I guess that could be proof that ‘environmental science’ in NOT a science.
That’s just it – these are, in the main, psychologists or sociologists, arts, political or business studies graduates who’ve seen a couple of nature documentaries and now want to ‘dabble’ in eco-studies as it makes them feel good about ‘doing something’ even if they’re actually making things far, far worse.
Anyone can self-identify as a “climate scientist” these days 🙂
Je suis Sir David Attenborough.
Climate and climate change isn’t a science, it’s history, the history of weather events on Earth.
History is the record of long past events and their context and how related. The longer the period studied, the better understanding of context and relationship.
The true specialists in climate are the Planet’s historians, geologists.
Climate is past – it’s not present or future. It will only be possible to have any sensible understanding of 20th & 21st Century climate after data review in about five or ten thousand years.
As someone remarked, putting climate in front of scientist is like putting witch in front of doctor.
Geologists are the real climate scientists.
“Climate” has been redefined by the World Meteorological Organization to be only 30 years of weather.
“The GBR could die THIS year.” Probably not.
Arctic summer sea ice could disappear this year. Probably not.
Sea level rise could suddenly accelerate this year. Probably not.
Wind could shed subsidies this year. Probably not.
DRAX could burn wood pellets without subsidies this year. Probably not.
Young fellow soon to have a useless degree and with first part time job in government looks forward to a career in the private sector. Probably not.
All those things will happen in 10 years. Al Gore says so.
Actually, Al said in 2008 that Arctic summer sea ice would be gone by about 2014, so ten years ago. Truly an inconvenient truth.
You are criticizing the old Al Gore predictions. I am promoting the new Al Gore predictions.
How can you not trust Al Gore? The man invented the internet. Made millions. Got rid of Tipper.
The first to predict boiling oceans, where fish you catch will be already cooked and ready to eat.
Gore used to be a contender and he’s coming back.
Ten year climate change predictions mature in ten years. They get replaced by new “even worse than we thought” ten year climate emergency predictions.
Climate science is all about predictions. If they are scary and you get enough people to believe them, then you are a brilliant climate scientist.
No: “said so twenty years ago”…
This year was 2023. It doesn’t seem to have died.
It’s actually a double degree, which is quite an achievement by the age of 22.
The piece is dated February 2024, but seems to be looking back on last year.
The part-time government job doesn’t seem to have lasted. He’s now with a think tank, also in Canberra.
ANU graduates seem to be condemned to working for one or the other. Canberra seems to be a black hole which they can’t escape even if they want to.
Two useless degrees at 22 is not an accomplishment. It is just doubly useless.
They should both be 3-year degrees. Even combined, it should still be 5.
The graffiti above the toilet roll holders in the Science and Engineering buildings used to say “Arts Degree. Please take one”
I always liked knowing at uni that the most probing, in depth, question they would ask once they graduated was “would you like fries with that?”
It would seem that a Batchelor of Arts (Environmental “Studies”) is basically identical to a degree in Political Science. Because it’s all just politics, there is no science in Political Science. The fact that it’s under a “Studies” field is even more damning. Environmental Studies has the same amount of scientific rigor and validity as Fat Studies and Gender Studies. These are entirely activist fields interested only in the indoctrination of activists to push an agenda that is very deeply based in Marxist ideology.
Double degree is not really “quite an achievement” … start at 17 y.o. and finish at 22 y.o. This is not as uncommon as one may think.
A double degree is nothing out of the box, especially in the Humanities. Doing it in 4 years is still pretty good going.
5 years is normally combined, like Arts Law, rather than double.
I know Med is now a double at a lot of Unis, but that’s 6 or 7 years. Vet Science used to have the option of a 6 year B.Sc. + B.V.Sc. instead of the usual 5 year B.V.Sc.
Not many people get to start Uni at 17, it’s usually 18.
Perhaps I’m just way out of date on this stuff, and anyway they do things differently inside the ACT’s Schwarzschild radius.
So if the GBR does not die this year, is Gottchalk going to re-examine his credulous belief. I much doubt it. The death of the GBR will be next just year for the next century if the wheels don’t fall off the climate scare industry.
Who pays attention to 21-year-olds?
Yes, but they are the future of this planet. It’s just so sad that when they start off on their working lives that their heads are filled with all this nonsense. And they unquestioningly believe it all…they have been so indoctrinated already. It’s like a toxic virus they have all been infected with at university. And they will spread it.
We need to be the vaccine against this global plague…we need to talk to our friends, colleagues and family about it every day or the battle is lost.
Relax, whatever he and his contemporaries do it won’t effect the future of our Planet.
And if they do manage to have an effect, it will be to their detriment.
They are the ones that will have to suffer the consequences of their idiotic anti-CO2 actions.
That’s not how it played out when young activists descended on Ukraine in 1932 and stole the Winter grain of the farmers and peasants.
The Ukrainians starved to death. The young activists went on to plump careers in the Nomenklatura.
Being one of the Nomenklatura isn’t a career choice, it’s a class you’re born into – the idle, entitled children of the party elite. Sound familiar?
But they think that if they repeat what they have been told then they will have faster career advancement up the ladder, and when they start loading the box cars they will be spared because they towed the party line, like useful idiots.
That is a statement of fact that needs to be broadcast more widely. I always get an incredulous blank look when i tell the disciples that i dont care as they will have to explain their idioticy to their children and grandchildren how they destroyed Western civilisation.
Of course not – whatever happens the planet will be fine.
No – it’s what he and his contemporaries might do to the human and animal populations on the planet that worry me.
19 year old?
“It’s just so sad that when they start off on their working lives that their heads are filled with all this nonsense.”
It’s time for new nonsense
I recommend predicting an invasion of aliens from the planet Uranus. Even worse than an invasion from Central and South America. I only fear the Uranians will demand to see the US leader, When we claim our leader is Jumpin’ Joe Biden, they will not believe us and will then vaporize our planet with a Uranian death ray.
That would be a lot more exciting than the dying GBR that never dies. Or allegedly dying polar bears that keep multiplying.
A fellow 74 year old friend said recently- “everyone under 40 now looks like children”.
When I was living in China the consensus was that you weren’t an adult till after 30.
Even that is optimistic.
That’s probably pretty close, as the prefrontal cortex does not complete development until about 27.
This is also the age at which criminality drops off rapidly, and also artistic creativity. The full development of the prefrontal cortex is required for proper understanding of the consequences of actions and decision making. This is why young people often do what seems to be stupid and impulsive things.
I’m 71 – those under 40 ARE children with the emotional and intellectual age of two year olds.
And we know this man-boy (aged 22) will never change.
Not his ideas nor his allegence.
The die is cast and he will never change . .
Don’t tell me..let me guess…Adam uses FF every day of his life, of course! Another newly minted Climate Hypocrite, riding high on his white horse (SUV) telling us all scary stories and why the peasants should give up their luxuries for climastrology.
With qualifications like his it’s difficult to argue. Perhaps Jennifer could take him for a swim. Maybe come back without him!
“DCCEEW is doing important work. My team assists the financial sector to redirect capital towards activities that benefit biodiversity. They call these activities “nature-positive”.”
Let’s help with pronunciation of that acronym. Say it like, “Don’t Chew.”
Don’t grow the food, don’t transport the food, don’t process the food, don’t refrigerate the food, don’t cook the food – with fossil fuels contributing to any of these steps. So Adam, please don’t even think about eating the food.
I have run in to these types numerous times, less so in the private sector, but certainly a lot in government. They are the fodder for the climate shock troops. Some of them grow up quickly as they see what they were taught at uni may have been a little coloured, and some of them sink into the despair of the progressives future further.
The last type will mock you and never pick up a book or study a subject, relying on what they are fed on X or Facebook by some “expert” as gospel. These ones can’t “do the math” and rely on “gospel” or “doctrine” as proclaimed, while they prance around in clothing and goods made off shore, in sweat shops, and made from the very substances that they believe is killing the planet. The ones that grow up will at first mock you, but then they will discover that what they have learned may not have been totally correct. They will then come at you grudgingly to debate a topic, and likely discover that things are never black and white, only shades of grey. Some of them actually start to do research and try to understand the issue in a more balanced way. And some actually try to do the math.
Aus has slipped much in the last 70 years, and is now filled with the type of urban know-it-all that disparage the knowledge of their elders. They might accept that knowledge if it comes from an indigenous person, but a lot of that gets filtered through “leading climate scientists”, so they may not be getting that knowledge. I know my direct ancestor (the first to raise cattle across the Murray) learned much from the local tribes, otherwise he would not have been able to raise cattle there. He passed on what he had learned and was respected. But then, he was just a farmer.
The once Professional Aussie group CSIRO has slipped into uselessness, along with the CONICET and USGS. All three succumbed to WOKE politics and blended Science with Political Science. Political Science is The Art of distorting Science For Fun and Profit (acronym TAODSFFAP, pronounced Totally F..ked Up).
Corals do not “bleach” because of warm water.
In fact they LUV water water, otherwise they would not be mostly found in the tropics.
The reason for the 2015 surface bleaching (as seen from an aircraft flying overhead), was a drop in the sea level, meaning the surface corals were left exposed to too much sunlight and UV.
Chart is the sea level data from that period.
I don’t know if there has been a similar drop in sea level this El Nino.
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/08/climate-change-causes-another-year-of-record-highest-ever-coral-cover-on-earths-largest-reef/
But the brainwashed are legion so it may not be useful to feature them. Bad science might be better.
I first read stories about the GBR dying in the 1960s. This is like a Hollywood crime movie death scene where some bad guy is shot but has enough energy to give a long dissertation before his “final breath”. And then you see him in another movie six months later and he gets shot again.
Do you think his trip to Lady Elliot Island will be by dug-out canoe?
Is it me or does Lady Elliot Island sound a bit trans?
Australian leftists are now claiming the GBR has been dying since the 1960s but the HUGE damage is not visible from the air because smarmy Australian conservatives have been replacing the dead coral with weighted plastic coral replicas like people use in fish tanks.
From the air they look like real coral.
No scientists would ever put on a wet suit and touch the coral — a flyover is good enough to verify what their computer models previously predicted.
Scientists say
the “healthy GBR” is a hoax
Mainly plastic fake coral there now
And when scientists say anything,
people listen.
We grow real coral in our fish tanks … long before “scientists” knew much. They are comparatively way behind the 8-ball.
Had a bloke from UQ marine sciences come around many years ago to get live samples for research. He was blown away by the size and colouration of my stock.
You see, you had a golden opportunity to provide a link to this information online – a perfect chance to back up your opinion with actual evidence. But then you blew it, hence the downvotes.
So you’re downvoting a facetious joke because you don’t understand it?
Greene’s real posts contain the same evidence as the joke … hence the facetious response from Page.
(or I am wrong, and it was just a kneejerk response to a proven jerk.)
Either way, I upvoted it.
Yes, Greene’s reputation precedes him. In addition to his many boorish posts, he doesn’t understand “brevity is the soul of wit”, unless of course he’s dismissing someone or someone’s post as “total BS.” One gets the impression that he feels the need to one-up everyone, on everything. He probably has a blog.
Good sarcasm on a roll in the thread three up votes from me.
I do that sometimes too mocking their poor prediction history by saying things like the Chrystal ball was foggy at the time or their greenie payment was too late to make them correct later…..
“I am starting my first office job. It’s a government job”
wow, a “gub-mint” job- now, just be sure to kiss up- and you’re set for life- never have to get your hands dirty or really stretch your mind creatively- just show up most days and never complain, don’t worry about having to accomplish anything – after 30 years, you’ll get your pension- then you can move to a condo in Florida
then he says, “Everyone in my team is positive about nature.”
Oh, wow- I’m SO impressed- not. Not exactly Henry David Thoreau.
“Wikipedia tells me…”
Wow, what a moron. His writing style and level of sophistication is about 8th grade.
…because of the El Nino event just begun, the Great Barrier Reef could die this year.
Is an El Nino caused by climate change, or did we have them before the industrial age? How would lowering CO2 prevent an El Nino from occurring and prevent the Great Barrier Reef from dying, if that’s what’s going to happen?
That would have to be one hell of an el Nino to kill the entire GBR! Just goes to show that the double degree has taught him nothing.
“Is an El Nino caused by climate change, or did we have them before the industrial age?”
I think the corals have been around for about 200 million years and have survived countless El Nino’s. They survived in much warmer temperatures than today. They even survived the asteriod that killed the dinosaurs, and they survived atomic bombing.
Corals are pretty tough creatures. A little El Nino is nothing to them.
Claiming the corals will be wiped out is crazy, given the facts, which are available to anyone who cares to look. This guy should have looked before making his coral claims.
“Young people haven’t developed a lifetime habit of always questioning what they are told.”
Unfortunately, I know way too many elders who have never questioned authority.
That is a Wokachusetts Hahvahd problem. Been there, done that, times 3.
Oreskes PhD is in history of science. After she is gone, it won’t go well for her reputation in the history of science community.
Hahvahd also made her a ‘double’ tenured faculty ‘climate scientist’. To unwittingly insure her future ignominy alongside the likes of DEI hire former Hahvahd president Claudine Gay.
In Gay’s case, a plagarized Hahvahd PhD thesis and a total academic output since of 11 mediocre papers and no books and no outside engagements of note.
Compare former Harvard professor Stephen J. Gould, tenured 3x professor of Geology, Paleontology, and Evolutionary Biology. Creator of the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain the paleontology fossil record from the Cambrian Explosion on (just two of his many books—Cambrian Explosion and Punctuated Equilibrium. Most fun is his book of essays titled The Pandas’ Thumb [hint, it isn’t]). Curator of Harvard’s Aggazis Museum. Hundred of papers, many books. No plagiarism. Died far too early of stomach cancer.
I weep now for my alma mater.
I’ve read most of Gould’s books and enjoyed them very much. I saw him once in a public lecture shortly before he passed.
Dr Jennifer Marohasy:
“As I show in the film, A Coral Bleaching Tragedy, the tragedy is not with the corals but how that coral reef has been so misreported and so misunderstood.
The film also demonstrates the nonsense of attempting to determine the health of a coral from an aeroplane as reported in recent official surveys. To know the true state of the corals it is necessary to get into and under the water”.
Young Adam should buy himself some diving equipment and underwater camera (charged to taxpayers of course) and go down to see for himself.
Young Adam could also immensely increase his knowledge and understanding about the survivability of coral reefs by diving deep into the OBSERVED total resurrection of the Bikini Atoll lagoon reefs in just 65 years after being totally annihilated by atom bomb testing in the 1950s.
I keep saying that corals are like weeds of the marine scape –
you can’t get rid of the buggers.
Young Adam’s mom has trouble getting him into the bath let alone under the sea!
It’s going to be a short El Niño, neutral by May. So I guess the GBR will be saved. Phew.
Damage will depend on if there is a major cyclone or not…
… and how much the El Nino drags down sea levels.
“I’m not accusing the scientist who you think told you the reef would die this year of lying…”
You should accuse them of incompetence, because that’s the defining fact of the situation.
Adam might have misinterpreted what he was told, his use of “basically” suggests he is aware he is interpreting.
He certainly caught the gist of the message. And Peter Ridd’s experience nails it,
I have now dealt quantitatively with all manner of climate-crisis so-called scientists, Eric. Incompetence is strong among them.
When you “interpret” a language you need to know both languages. Unless, of course, you are a South African government hand-sign language expert.
LOL :-).
” positive about nature ” I’m not sure what this means. Fluff it is, me thinks.
Young Adam needs to get his priorities in order.
“Son, it’s faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, more money.”
Tom T. Hall
Mark Twain once commented on an inheritance he received when he was young:
“I spent most of it on strong liquor and fast women. The rest of it I just wasted.“
He is merely signaling his faith in the Curch of Scientism, and that all of his co-workers also believe in the faith. He truly believes in the Climate Emergency (or is it Global Boiling now?). This signals to other believers in the faith that his prognostications are in the furtherance of the faith.
I well remember the two governing factors of coral survival from palaeontology courses in the 1960’s–1. They have an ‘infinite capacity of reproduction’; and 2. numbers are limited only by the availability of space to anchor when they change from pelagic to benthonic stages of their life cycle.
Add to that, that solubility of CaCO3 in sea water decreases with rising temperature; it requires less energy to be expended by the polyp to precipitate calcite for living space as temperature rises. Basic principles of life predict that coral will do better in warming water.
And–ocean ‘acidification’ to describe a slight lowering of a decidedly alkaline pH is a term as misleading as is a ‘normal’ value of a climate variable–but all that is so easily unknown by someone with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Nevertheless, an unfortunate attribute of experts in Politics, Philosophy and Economics is the conclusion that they know everything.
No, I have no more idea of how to fix this than I now know of how to obtain justice for Michael Mann. Perhaps the elimination of degrees in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (remembering the saying that ‘you could line up all the economists end-to-end and they’d still point every which way) might help.
Adam. I suggest your goal should be to have a useful life. May I suggest to you firstly get off the crowded public service teat and change careers to potato harvesting or fruit picking to achieve this goal of a useful life. Good boy👌👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
adam gobshyte is full of it – he’s begging for money here
How many 21yo get a by-line in the SMH. The Government Class reward their own. Think of the process to get this article published. I suspect it a propaganda piece for the Department of letters.
I have not bought a news rag for 5 years now and this article underlines the reason. I rarely read fiction by choice and fairy tails dressed up as news is as bad as it gets.
To be fair it was well written, I don’t think it is any mystery SMH published it.
AI intervention ?
He he – lets give him the benefit of the doubt.
Methinks someone had a bit of coaching with his words.
Seriously though it is just green honey pot shit and makes me vomit . .
The GBR is where it is BECAUSE of global warming.
The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is considered the youngest reef system in the world with its earliest beginning around 600,000 years ago and the modern GBR forming only 9,500 years ago. Coral reefs are limestone structures (Calcium carbonate structures) produced by living organisms.
In other words, the GBR has grown to its current size and location ONLY after the last ice age ended and we entered the current interglacial. Uh, warm is good for those little corals…
It’s a lot more than “warm is good”. Coral needs sea water, and before 9500 hyears ago there wasn’t any sea water where the GBR is now – sea levels were 120 metres (400ft) lower.
Please Adam, do a bit of research on these claims. Read Mahorasy and Ridd and you will see that there has been a conspiracy of hiding data and facts. Dr Mahorasy put on a wetsuit and dived on the Reef. Others from JCU get in a Cessna and fly over it. The GBR is the size of England and Ireland+ and the size of Victoria and Tasmania+. It runs over 2000 km North to South and is up to 250km wide. To suggest it will die in a short time frame is naive. In it’s current iteration it is over 500,000 years old.