The Greening of Gavin

Archives for February 2011

Costa is Cool

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Yes folks that is right, Costa Georgiadis is one cool guy and knows a thing about why we should all record our sustainable journey.  He confirmed what I already knew, and that is that by recording our journeys, it inspires other to act.  Watch the video I took below.




I was so inspired with his words that I asked him to be a friend on facebook. I wrote that I wrote this blog and would like to put a short video of his talk up on YouTube for all to see.

Hi Costa,

The talk was great. In fact I took a video of it and was wondering if I could put the first couple of minutes of it up on YouTube where you talk about firsts and why we should record our sustainable actions?

I write a blog called The Greening of Gavin whereby I document my sustainable journey since watching An Inconvenient Truth way back in September 2006. www.greeningofgavin.com. I am also an avid gardener and have my own organic food forest including chooks.

Please let me know soonest as I would love to write a blog post about the things you talked about.

Regards,

Gavin

 I hope he doesn’t mind, but here is his reply;

Re: Hey Gavin
Mate it sends a chill down my spine when I hear that something I said or something the show displayed has inspired someone in some way. Everything has to be open source I have learnt so take these moments of insight and inspiration, those light bulb moments where something clicks inside and share it to the four corners of the globe. I couldn’t ask for a more full and final payment for what I do…its all about the soul when you boil it down and if we can talk to each other as a world on this level more often then what a great place we will develop. Go for your life with spreading your blog, your ever changing view… now that is something to celebrate.. Thanks for making my day

More microbes to you indeed Gav

Costa

I think that means that I have permission! What a cool guy.  You can catch his TV show, Costa’s Garden Odyssey over on SBS TV.  Nice one Costa!

Stupid Politicians

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In The Age newspaper today;

“Polar bears, stay calm. Fairy penguins inhabiting ice floes, chill out. Seals, go back to being all furry and cute in National Geographic. Y’all can relax.

Climate change is not real and the seas are not rising.

This surprising fact was revealed yesterday by a Nationals senator, Ron Boswell, during a Senate estimates hearing with the Department of Climate Change.
 

During a quibble over the amount by which oceans are allegedly expanding, Senator Boswell felt he could hold his truth inside no longer. ”Being someone who has spent his life in boats, since I was a kid, I haven’t seen any sea level change,” he pronounced.

That’s settled, then. Just call him the Archimedes of Estimates.”

Honestly, I thought that our politicians had more sense, but obviously the right have no bloody idea and have their heads stuck firmly up a climate denialists arse.   To make matters worse I was listening to the Parliamentary debate live from the House of Representatives on ABC News Radio on the way home and not one, but two liberal members stated that climate change was a scam and not actually happening.  WTF, and please explain?

Their reasoning was as follows.  Just because we now have had floods and above average rainfall, it means that all the climate scientists are wrong as they were predicting hotter, drier conditions over the longer term.   That certainly is not true as these clowns cannot read a trend line to save themselves.  So as global ocean temperatures rise, so does evaporation over the oceans as do storm events and warming certainly has not slowed down.  To prove a point, here is a data set that I captured off of our very own Bureau of Meteorology.  It shows the Annual Mean Surface Temperature Anomaly for the entire world.  Not just Australia, but the entire world.

So which piece of factual data about climate change do the honourable members of our conservative parties not actually understand?  It certainly has me buggered!  The data shows that the world is still warming, and rapidly at that.

Common sense will prevail, I hope.

David Suzuki is a Wise Elder

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Over the course of the weekend, I had the pleasure of listening to David Suzuki speak on a couple of occations at the Sustainable Living Festival.

Firstly on Saturday when he was interviewed by the 3CR crew, where I listened to him speak about the environment and the issues we face,

 and secondly when he gave an introduction for Clive Hamilton who spoke about why we are not acting quickly enough on climate change mitigation.  In fact David was more engaging than Clive, who used too many big words for this little greenie.  I got the gist of his presentation, but OMG it took all of my concentration to keep up with him.  I think I would rather read Clive’s work than listen to him present.  Sorry, but just being honest.

Anyway, both of David’s talks/introductions were interesting and engaging.  I managed to record some of the radio interview on video and put it up on YouTube.  His words of wisdom really lit a spark in me, brought a smile to my face that someone was actually speaking truthfully, and it is well worth the 14 minutes that it will take to watch it.

Please enjoy David Suzuki telling it how it is!

Gav