White House adviser takes fears about climate change out of the realm of the abstract

The Obama government finds 'global warming' lacks punch

Erik Hayden in The Atlantic Wire blog at the weekend says the Right is having a field day with a new official term for global warming coined by an adviser to President Barack Obama:

IN an attempt to avoid "oversimplifying" the scientifically supported but nevertheless controversial theory of global warming, White House science adviser John Holdren unveiled a new way to describe the climate change phenomenon: "global climate disruption". The clunky phrase, which was announced in Holdren's speech in Oslo, Norway, is only the latest in a series of terms that veer away from "global warming" since temperature change was deemed not "the most severe effect of changing climate" by NASA in 2008. Needless to say, pundits -- many of them conservative -- had a field day with the new terminology. Wesley J. Smith at First Things: " resorting to word engineering demonstrates a substantial lack of confidence in the effectiveness of hysteria advocacy". Carol Driver in the Daily Mail: "[The Obama administration believes it might] drive the message to ordinary people -- and put the bill back on the agenda for next year's legislative session."

Rachel Brown in the Fairfax NSW tabloid The Sun-Herald yesterday:

SMALL canteens constructed under the federal government's Building the Education Revolution program encourage the provision of pre-packed heat-and-serve food. Critics of the canteens, which are about 24sq m and cost up to $600,000, say they lack the space needed to prepare fresh food. The department has agreed to extend the new canteen being built at Tottenham Central School near Dubbo after parents complained it was unusable.

A worthy if late follow-up to Natasha Bita in The Australian last May 17:

BARELY bigger than a cubby house, canteens built under the federal government's schools stimulus scheme are costing taxpayers $25,000 a square metre. Orange Grove Public School, in Sydney's inner west, was knocked back on its request for a school hall, but given $550,000 to build a brick canteen too small to fit a stove or even a pie-warmer. Tottenham Central School, west of Dubbo, cannot fit the fridges from its old demountable canteen into the new building that is half the size. P&C president Rick Bennett said . . ."I'm absolutely bloody gutted that there's been $600,000 of taxpayer money [spent] on this. It should cost $80,000."

Tony Abbott, at the Liberal Party's NSW state council meeting on Saturday, offers this variation on that much discussed notion, a mandate to govern:

WE have Prime Minister Gillard saying that she has a blank cheque to break promises [in the hung parliament]. What an outrage! If the Prime Minister did not believe that she could put her election commitments into practice she should not have accepted a commission from the Governor-General.

And Abbott on September 9 after two independents gave their support to Labor:

FOR our country's sake, I hope that the Labor Party can provide a better government in this term of parliament than it has over the last three years.

Gillard gives her version of the elusive mandate in the annual Ben Chifley "Light on the Hill" speech in Bathurst on Saturday:

WE might be a minority administration but I want our government to deliver outcomes and vision for Australia as though we had won a landslide, just like [John] Curtin and [Ben] Chifley did between 1941 and 1943.

With a caveat in an interview the same day in the Fairfax press:

IT'S not business as usual for measures that require substantial legislation . . . [the] big picture reforms, and anything associated with climate change is obviously one where we're in this new environment.

In the eye of the beholder: a website headline from Fairfax yesterday:

NEW life for right-to-die debate.

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