Tim Flannery: Climate's last chance

By the mid-1970s, the Arctic icecap began melting away at the rate of 8 per cent a decade. This rate of melting persisted almost unchanged until 2004, by which time about one-quarter of the icecap had melted, revealing the dark ocean underneath.

During the summer, the sun falls for 24 hours a day on the Arctic icecap, delivering a huge amount of energy. But ice is bright, and before its melting the Arctic icecap reflected 90 per cent of the sun's energy back into space, keeping the planet cool. But as the ice has melted, more of the sun has fallen on the ocean, and it absorbs 90 per cent of the sun's energy, turning it into heat.

By last year, so much of the sunlight was being captured by the ocean and turned into heat energy that a dramatic change occurred: the ocean stayed so warm that the winter ice did not form properly, and the following summer about 300,000 square kilometres of ice melted. The same thing happened this year, so now huge areas of ocean are exposed where just a few short years ago there was ice.

Before 2004, the rate of melt was such that scientists believed the icecap would melt entirely by about 2100. At the trajectory set by the new rate of melt, however, there will be no Arctic icecap in the next five to 15 years. And with no ice, the Arctic region will rapidly begin heating, perhaps by as much as 12 degrees.

This change will put further pressure on the Greenland icecap, which is already melting at the stupendous rate of 235 cubic kilometres a year. If it succumbs to the heat, the ocean will rise by six metres, and icecaps in the Antarctic may destabilise.

James Hanson, director of NASA's Goddard Institute, is arguably the world authority on climate change. He predicts that we have just a decade to avert a 25-metre rise of the sea. Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof. That's what a 25-metre rise in sea level looks like.

Susan Maushart (a sample from): iAnxiety

Constiplaystation: having abnormally infrequent or painful turns at the video console.

mySpace Cadet: a teenager who spends too much time away with the pixels.

False-Positive Parenting: pretending to hug a child in order to read his Instant Message screen.

Infomaniac: a woman with an uncontrollable urge for text.

iDentity Crisis: when you can’t remember the hint to remember your password.

Michael Leunig: Lest we forget

Now it happens again - the all-powerful Australian swinger-people have changed their minds and are rejecting the war in Iraq. After having endorsed it at the ballot boxes they are now disowning it in the opinion polls.

The shouting and the tumult dies, the captains and the kings depart. Iraq lies mutilated, traumatised and chaotic. Western civilisation has once more created shit and derision in someone else's home. Has something gone wrong or has it all gone as guaranteed in the primal darkness of the great, white Western mind: this racist, relic treasure we're told must be defended?

What has taken the swinging people so long? Could it be that they secretly enjoy a little taste of fresh blood, but when it gets tainted with shit, then they spit it out and go and water the roses?

And where have they gone now - the ones who cheered and promoted this cowardly war: the ones who were never conscripted, the thinkers, writers and commentators - even the odd bishop and cartoonist who rose up to help with the government's dirty, deceitful work - what do these cruel blundering idiots say about this mess and misery which is spreading out of control? Most likely they are working on their exit strategies - fudging, skulking and weaseling their way back to nicey-nicey land.

Guy Rundle: The rat pack is in poll position

One way or another across the English-speaking world we are currently running what are more or less post-democratic societies. British New Labour rules with 36 per cent of the vote, and the support of only 22 per cent of the adult population. The turnout is not apathy about politics, but simple resignation at the uselessness of turning out in a first-past-the-post system when the contending parties are practically identical. Labour has no intention of letting that go, and nor do the Tories, which is why they are reported to have held talks about the possibility of a grand coalition if the next election should give the Liberal Democrats enough seats to hang the parliament. Should that occur, the plan goes, the larger of either Labour or Conservative would govern with the in-principle support of the other party on key issues such as passage of the budget and conduct of war, but without being coalition partners. Both sides will argue that first-past-the-post systems are necessary to have governments that can implement clear initiatives - such as Gordon Brown's recently established commission to find out why people are so disengaged from politics.

Patricia Anderson reviewing Shelly Gare's book, The triumph of the Airheads …

Those MBA and masters degrees that seem to be bestowed like free samples at a cosmetics counter, the erosion of literacy in schools, the disappearance of reasonable manners, the blooming of generic conversational mannerisms lifted from some American sitcom, these are all grist to Gare's mill. In increasingly unrecognisable times, she bemoans a world in which knowledge and common sense are an inconvenience and problems are dismissed by ethical midgets, buffered by more ethical midgets whose heads all nod together around the boardroom table like a field of sunflowers.

There were more, but I couldn't find an internet presence for them. Wait, there is another one. James Ellroy wrote a two page "final autobiographical statement" in the LA Times recently. Each sentence is fired from an AK-47. Here is his brief description of the people who migrated to Los Angeles in the Forties and became the underbelly of the whitebreads and their two-car garages.

James Ellroy: The Great Right Place: James Ellroy comes home

… picaresque grifters, dollar-driven D.A.s, well-hung gigolos, hollow-eyed strumpets, hophead jazz musicians, pervert cops, alcoholic private eyes, sadistic studio heads, laudanum-lapping layabouts, homosexual informants, religious quacks and an uncategorizable array of stupes with indefinable psychopathic mandates and plain inconsolable despair.

-- Olney Garkle