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.
What climate science needs isn’t more climate scientists but some climate statisticians prepared to talk openly about what the data is really saying.
The Naracoorte Cave research will no doubt confirm the dooming-
Naracoorte Caves study shows ice age Australia was wetter, more animal-friendly, than first thought (msn.com)
That’s if the plague of locusts don’t get us all first-
Climate change could trigger giant ‘megaswarms’ of locusts, study warns (msn.com)
Resistance is futile against the dooming Adam so hanging out with deniers in Environment Departments will only distract you from making your peace with wrathful Gaia in the short time you have left. That’s the only final tipping point to heed now Adam and staying calm for the sake of the kiddies.
“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.”
Does anyone know what this article is and who wrote it? That should be what is ridiculed, not some kid who is easily led
No idea. I think he’s clueless, read a couple of alarmist articles and now believes this rubbish. There have been a couple of very alarmist studies, plus some silliness from the IPCC that modeled the RCP 8.5 and pronounced that ‘99% of corals may die by 2050’. I can’t find any articles saying the GBR is due to die off in the next year or so at all.
“Young people haven’t developed a lifetime habit of always questioning what they are told.”
You mean young people like Greta Thunderstorm?
Poor kid
a likely suicide, another victim of climate change policy.
It’s not a job. It’s just an internship – all the fun and none of the responsibility.The Australia Institute are hair shirt wearing ecofascists.
I wonder what he’ll say a year from now when the GBR is still alive and thriving? I will watch his future (excuses) with considerable interest.
He’ll say nothing or come out with some new idiocy – they have no shame and no conscience.
When you are a multi billionaire you can pump and dump across currencies, making further billions while destroying nations.
I recall a series of newspaper stories and press releases in Canada all saying the Loonie was going to gain strongly against the US dollar. The loonie fell more than 10% over the next month.
I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that all activists, people in the doom-soon industries, ‘scientists’, prod-nose busybodies, etc all are paid to do jobs which have no productive, wealth generating output or benefit to Humanity and live off the proceeds of wealth generators whom they wish to immiserate and impoverish and destroy.
So what, exactly, is this climatard going to do that will kill the reef?
Australian National University environmental studies major:
The environment is a major discourse and force in society. It is an entity that is simultaneously responsive to and independent of social action, and that transcends human cultures and sovereign borders. It is a point of continuity and shared structure for all living things, and all forms of life are dependent on its vital energies and natural assets. And yet, human and non-human social agents are located in, experience and respond to different environments. Its changing form and localised manifestations make the environment an essential topic of social scientific study, especially in an age of climate transformation. The major in Environmental Social Science exposes students to the complex and dynamic relationships between social and environmental systems, processes and change. Students undertaking the major will be taught about environmental matters from a diverse range of disciplines and perspectives, such as sociology, biological anthropology, history, development studies, indigenous studies, policy studies, geography, human ecology, and sustainability science. A focal point for analysis is the interactivity between humans and the non-human environment in various contexts, as well as the impacts and implications of global and everyday events on environmental processes, and vice versa. Students will be provided with the inter-disciplinary knowledge and research skills necessary to engage with the wicked environmental issues confronting societies of today and of the future, and with the opportunity to translate these attributes into various outputs and interventions.
I wonder if the course teaches then to exorcise the wickedness?
And anyone with a PPE should be kept away from any responsible job.
“Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, lamenting the lack of urgency in addressing climate change.”
I am lamenting the waste of educational resources that produced that sentence and the following drivel.