Australian Env Scientist – Gagged and grief-stricken, but not without hope

But was the world burned by nuclear holocaust, or did the Y2K melt down the nuclear powerplants causing a global Chernobyl disaster? Did the ozone layer disappear and did the acid rains kill all forests? Extrapolating from a short period to a distant catastrophe can poison your life, while usually when a problem gets bad enough, then widespread consensus forms against it and appropriate resources are allocated. *

Regarding IT security: I surely wouldn't be sleepless over IT security, given my money is reasonably safe and insured. Hackers won't destroy the water supply or nuclear reactors, even if they might be able to, or at most cause some incidents before steps are taken. Terrorists have vast possibilities already, we shouldn't be so arrogant to think that IT is so special that it is especially susceptible to causing some global catastrophe. One can already buy a hacksaw and tear down power lines, no need to hack a powerplant. One can poison water reservoirs, etc. No need for Hollywood drama, where special single points of failure are protected by (lone) heroes, protecting us from the lone maniacs. Our society is vulnerable and fragile, since at least 50 years ago, and it is not being attacked because nobody really wants to attack it.

I'm more concerned about the gradual decline of privacy caused by the fear-mongering situations like outlined above. (If you meant this than I misunderstood you, sry.)

* - Or we die. We die someday anyway.

> For me being in cybersecurity is watching a "slow motion suicide by apathy". The unfolding, preventable catastrophe haunts me.

Wait, "catastrophe" singular? That sounds way worse than what I’m envisioning (increasing rates of hacks, data breaches, and perhaps a couple catastrophic events that contributes to, but not single handedly causes, an economic crisis). Your wording suggest something like our computers or network becoming so untrustworthy we can’t even use them.

Do you have an executive summary of what you’re hinting at?

> Cassandra complex is a real and horrible state of mind.

Not only does it destroy you mentally you're almost certainly wrong too, so you suffered for nothing.

Firefox with NoScript works. That way the entire page loads in less than half a second, too.

? it's specifically about Australia, where the government has largely been climate-denalists for two decades, including sabotaging government research projects: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/16/csiro...

is it really so hard to imagine that perhaps the climate issues that have been "constantly talked about for 20+ years" have been heavily moderated/filtered/co-opted by financial/political interests?

The current party line is "holy shit we gotta do something soon or 2100 is gonna be bad, ya'll!". Thing is, essentially nobody today will be alive by 2100. Humans are not very good at thinking in these kinds of timescales. Corporations are hilariously bad at thinking beyond the next quarterly financial report.

So if it turns out that we're witnessing irreversible and catastophic changes to important natural systems that many of us will witness first-hand in our own lives, don't you think it's entirely plausible that the people in charge don't want us to learn the full scope of how bad things got under their watch? That the people profiting from this carnage don't want the majority to act in a way that impacts their profits?

I was thinking the same thing. I started thinking the article was satire towards the end. I was expecting that it would be about climate scientists being gagged for not being alarmist enough or for presenting some evidence that went against the climate change narrative.

I know of such incident from a town near were I lived where a marine biologist with a PhD was fired for publishing a paper which claimed that coral bleaching had improved. You never hear about such cases on mainstream news.

Who knows maybe this article is a psyop.

The examples given appear to all prior to the change of government in Australia last year.

The former Prime Minister, Scotty from Marketing, was famously heavy handed and self serving with respect to his image (and by extension what he thought the image of Australia should be). As a prominent member of a particular big tent evangelical church he never did abide with the notion that man might impact the world.

This is about the suppression of direct personal testimony on the effects of climate from senior scientists that were part of the government research teams generally under a CSIRO umbrella.

Papers were published, reporters were advised, articles were printed, but certain types of strong language was edited out and direct interviews with particular people were denied in various ways - the article alleges.

It's almost as if almost all public servants in all governments are required not to be political publicly and is written into their contracts.

This take made me cringe. The only one putting emphasis on the fact that this scientist who has visited Antarctica 20 times in their life happens to be female, is you.

You overlooked the other male scientists in the article that spoke out on the same issues?