Adrian has just returned from a two week trip to Tassie. The trip came about when he was invited to be the guest climate change speaker at the Weld Convergence held near Huonville on the 19-21st of Jan.

The presentation was a general introduction to climate change, but also included the reasons why we need to go to zero emissions and below and the link between the destruction of vital carbon sinks when you log an old growth forest and convert it to a 80 year rotation production forest.

The talk was very well received and for some it was the first time they had been exposed to how serious a threat climate change is.

John Seed's "Climate Change Despair and Empowerment Roadshow" was a great success at both the Richmond and Ballarat events with around 300 and 150 people attending respectively.

At the Richmond presentations, hosted by the City of Yarra with enthusiastic support from the Yarra Mayor Jenny Farrar, participants were encouraged to join or form Climate Study/Action groups as a vehicle for communities to build resilient networks in which we can support each other in the changes we need to collectively make.

The Ballarat event was hosted by Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions (Breaze) and the event served to catalyse interest in the local group, with an enthusiastic discussion and desperate rush by large numbers of the audience to find people to give their membership money to.

December 8

Story from ABC News Online

Hobart scientists are heading to Antarctica to study the cause of enormous cracks forming in the Amery Ice Shelf.

The cracks began forming around a decade ago and are growing at three to five metres a day.

The fractures threatened to break off a 900-square-kilometre piece of the Amery Ice Shelf, which is about the size of Tasmania.

Scientists want to know what is causing these cracks, as the last recorded activity in this part of eastern Antarctica was in the 1960s.

Convenor of the Greenleap Strategic Institute, Philip Sutton, has released his presentation on why we must go to zero emissions and beyond across all sectors.

Mr Sutton's presentation runs through the reasons why the current goals adopted by governments and by the environment movement will lead us directly into a climate disaster of epic proportions and why we must immediately move to a zero emission minus goal.

Philip is a long-time environmental activist and campaigner, he currently runs the Greenleap Strategic Institute and is president of the Sustainable Living Foundation.

THE FIERCEST of Victoria's 230 bushfires, raging across a kilometre-and-a-half front in an open-cut coal mine at Morwell, is expected to burn until early next week.

Yesterday, two helicopters, 46 trucks and more than 200 firefighters fought to contain the blaze, which burned in walls of coal up to 30 metres high.

Elsewhere in the state yesterday, a 300-hectare blaze in bushland at Yallourn North was contained after it broke containment lines and began spotting close to houses. A fire 12 kilometres north-west of Erica, which has burnt out 600 hectares of forest was still listed as going, with firefighters carving an eight-kilometre control line around it.

THE ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropic group, giving it seed money of about $US1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.

But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists, and even lobby the US Congress. It will also pay taxes.

One of its maiden projects is bound to get attention. According to people briefed on the program, the organisation, called Google.org, aims to develop an extremely fuel-efficient, plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

The idea is to have a big petition from kids (people below voting age) to go to grown ups and to go to parliaments and local councils. The petition is asking grown ups to protect kids (and other living things) from global warming.

The petition project has been started by 6-year-old Joey Sutton Preece. He would like to set up a Kids' Committee and get a website going. He is hoping that the petition project will get lots of publicity on radio, TV and newspapers, by the display of stickers and through lots of people talking to each other. The website would have information about climate change and its effects on kids and could also have greenhouse computer games. Joey hopes the petition can be gathered worldwide.

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