CANA

Last Thursday, I gave a talk at the Climate Action Network conference here in Melbourne. I spent the days leading up to the conference fretting over my talk until I realized that 10-15 minutes wasn't enough time to come up with a grand vision, so I just banged some stuff on some slides and got on with it.

After my talk, I got pulled out of the meeting to do an interview with SBS television. The interview started off on rocky footing, when my interviewer said they were doing some general coverage in support of the recent report from NASA about the "melting ice in Antarctica". I said, "uh, you mean the Arctic". I guess if you're on the ground, the north and south poles do look fairly similar. . .

In any case, I was a wonderful interviewee in a bumbling Hugh Grant without the charm kind of way. Nevertheless, the interview died somewhere in editing, but they did show some footage of me giving my presentation - Uta said "it was very short, and you were very small." There goes my manhood. . .

Thursday night, a bunch of us CSIRO folks met up to catch Tim Flannery's talk re: his new book on climate change (The Weathermakers). We followed that with dinner at the Kitten Club (sounds a bit sordid, but I assure you everything was on the up-and-up), which was followed by "one" drink at the Gin Palace (although that one drink took three hours to finish and came in multiple instalments).