The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in sort of September, 2006 the climate issue had burst back on to the Australian political agenda thanks to the Millennium drought, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, the Stern Review, etc, There had been a massive “walk against warming”, and the question over as well, what was going to replace the Kyoto Protocol, and would Australia be in it?
By now Kevin Rudd had seized control of the Australian Labor Party from Kim Beasley, and was using climate as one of the sticks to beat John Howard with. So climate was extremely salient, and of course Four Corners, which is the ABCs flagship current affairs program had already tackled climate repeatedly in the 90s. In early 2006 it had broken the story about the “greenhouse mafia.”
What I think we can learn from this is that when you’re on the upswing of an issue attention cycle iI feeds on itself. It’s easy to write more stories. The public’s appetite for more stories has not been sated
What happened next is that climate stayed high on the political agenda for a surprisingly long time. This was because no solution was successfully implemented. Then the minority government of Julia Gillard, between 2010 and 2013 needed to push through carbon pricing legislation (this was exceptionally bloody).
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
