Best of 2025 - ‘Disaster season’: What is that?
Anika Wells, in announcing a meeting with three telco giants to discuss Optus’s Triple Zero emergency call system catastrophe in September, referred to the need for Australians to have confidence in the system before the coming disaster season. By that she meant summer. Is there really such a season?
Recent articles in Climate
9 January 2026
Best of 2025 - Koalas, carbon credits and the fine print of conservation
We congratulate the NSW Government for establishing the Great Koala National Park, which will protect a nationally significant koala population.
8 January 2026
Best of 2025 - A smart productivity play: Stop subsidising loss-making native forest logging
On 7 September 2025, NSW set the proposed 476,000-hectare boundary for the Great Koala National Park and halted native-forest logging within it (plantation harvesting continues), with formal gazettal slated for 2026.
7 January 2026
Best of 2025 - Climate change risk to our coastal cities
Confronting the nation’s coastal urban cities as it approaches 2055, 30 years on, will be both higher sea levels and air and water temperatures.
7 January 2026
Best of 2025 - Albanese’s sliding doors moment on climate
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has just been handed an unflinching mirror at the Pacific Islands Forum.
22 December 2025
2025 in Review: The fading West, a cautious Labor win and an uncertain world
From the erosion of Western authority to Australia’s election result, 2025 exposed deep shifts in global power, alliance politics and the limits of domestic reform.
22 December 2025
Cost of wind and batteries fall as CSIRO finds new way to show renewables are cheapest
CSIRO’s latest GenCost report shows battery costs falling fast, wind costs stabilising and coal, gas and nuclear lagging well behind. For the seventh year running, firmed renewables remain the lowest-cost path for Australia’s electricity system.
18 December 2025
Climate hot takes for 2025
Scientific evidence in 2025 showed global warming accelerating faster than expected, while emissions continued to rise and climate policy lagged dangerously behind physical reality.
17 December 2025
The long consequences of forgetting
As climate breakdown, war and institutional failure converge, the comforts of forgetting no longer shield us from the consequences of our own history.
12 December 2025
UN report: acting on climate now would make the world richer, not poorer
A major UN report finds that investing in climate action would deliver enormous economic gains, while failure to act would slash growth, drive instability and cost millions of lives.
11 December 2025
Deleting climate science: the Trump EPA rewrites the causes of warming
The Trump administration has removed references to human-caused climate change and key scientific data from EPA websites, alarming climate scientists and health experts.
29 November 2025
A long-overdue update to Australia’s broken environment laws
After years of delay, Australia will reform its broken environment laws. The deal brings real improvements, but key risks remain.
26 November 2025
Conservatism, denial and the climate crisis: why short-term thinking is holding us back
Human societies are generally conservative, averse to substantial change – and they are getting in the way of the necessary intervention on climate change and emissions reduction.
