Stranger than fiction. Love in a Cold Climate: the brilliant new novel by Tim Flannery

The nation's conscience reveals that he is guided by literature rather than the scientific method

Tim Flannery on Radio National's Breakfast on Friday:

FRAN Kelly: Love and trust and belief. This book from you, the scientist, is peppered with that kind of language. Do you see this as less a book of science and more a book of belief?

Flannery: I've begun to think I've misunderstood the scientific process. The reductionist science that I've practised all of my life is very good for answering the small questions, but I learnt as I looked at the climate problem that we can't use reductionist science to examine that system. We have to create a model world, a virtual world, which is what the computer models do. And those model worlds are actually very much like theatre or literature, novels where we create a kind of model of the world we live in and then vary some of the aspects of it. We can watch it play or we can look at a computer model. When you're dealing with complex problems that's what you need to do. So this book is in fact a synthesis of those approaches.

Flannery on ABC1's Lateline, November 23, 2009:

WHEN the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that's when science gets engaged.

Down with capitalism. Flannery on The 7.30 Report on Thursday:

THIS idea of the free market is one of the most dangerous spin-offs of Darwinism that we've seen, where we've had this idea that a free market will solve our problems. You've only gotta go back to the 18th century and see people selling their teeth to be set in the heads of rich men to understand how wrong that is, you know.

Let the markets rip. Flannery 12 hours later on Radio National's Breakfast:

THE marketplace is what made us. It's where we first learned to trust, to trade. The market is the only system where you get a win-win. Prior to that, someone would bang someone over the head and steal something, and it was a win-lose.

Former Labor pollster Rod Cameron on the judging panel for the Australian Financial Review's Power list in 2004:

I HAVE not seen an opposition leader in 30 years change the agenda as [Mark] Latham has done.

The Australian Financial Review's Power 2010 edition on Friday:

GRAHAME Morris: The Abbott factor has been a huge ingredient in the Australian political cake this year. Rod Cameron: I think you're overstating it, Grahame. Abbott didn't have a lot to do with [Kevin] Rudd's demise. It was nearly all of his own making.

The Spectator Australia editorialises:

SYDNEY University academic Rodney Tiffen poured cold water on the impeccable election coverage of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. Mr Murdoch's flagship newspaper, The Australian, is hardly in the pocket of Tory toffs. Metropolitan sophisticates would do well to remember that it was The Australian that broke the following stories: the children overboard affair, the Dr Mohamed Haneef drama, the Australian Wheat Board scandal, the Rob Gerard-RBA controversy, and so on. If breaking news stories critical of Kevin Rudd's government -- schools, the pink batts fiasco -- is evidence of unfair and unbalanced journalism, bring it on.

Christine O'Donnell on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect, American ABC, October 29, 1999:

I DABBLED into witchcraft, but I never joined a coven.

Maher: Wait a minute, you were a witch?

O'Donnell: I'm not making this stuff up. One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar and I didn't know it. I mean there was a little blood there and stuff like that . . .

Maher: That was a date?

O'Donnell: Yeah, we went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic. And it was on a satanic altar.

O'Donnell on Fox News on Tuesday:

THAT was a long time ago. My faith has matured. Who doesn't regret the '80s, to some extent? I certainly do.

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