"The Left", huh? Who exactly is "the Left"? Most people on the left hand side of the centre don't like VATs or GSTs (depending where you are) as they're regressive. They hurt the poorest people the most because they have to spend more of their income, they don't get the chance to invest it and let it grow.

Given Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", expenditures (mainly tax cuts for the rich) will be paid for by cutting medical coverage for those worst off, and firing most of the experts in government positions. It used to be regarded as patriotic to pay your taxes, now it's regarded as foolish.

No, I didn't get that because evidently I have a much better memory than you...

Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Victor Yushchenko; handing Buk SAMs to the rebels in the Donbas so they could shoot down MH17; invading Crimea. That's just a few I could remember while writing this (I did look up some of the spellings). There will be more (there's the infamous case of the Bulgarian(?) murdered in the west by an injection of Ricin, but that was in the cold war period so Soviet, not Russian). And plausible deniability drips all over a sudden pattern of internet cable breakages - if you can't see the pattern it's because you don't want to.

The Russians, and the Soviets before them, have a long track record of this sort of behaviour.

Why the passive-aggressive "I'm sorry"? Just come out and give us your opinion. Putting a flowery "I'm sorry" on the front isn't going to sugarcoat it for us, or make it any more or less correct.

There is an element of truth in that, in that some people write fluently and well, and others really struggle. However, the quality of the arguments you are making, or trying to make are also evident. And it can definitely be argued that if you can't support your argument in a written article, how are you going to support it in a work environment when someone higher-up asks you to give your opinion, or defend it? If you want to do well, then you will work at your writing. Those folks who do pre-semester writing courses? They're the ones taking it seriously.

Most courses that I've ever seen only used essays when they were appropriate. CompSci courses didn't use essays at all, and History was effectively nothing but. Might be different in the US. I'm all in favour of the old style of putting everyone in huge drafty examination rooms and making them sit there for 90mins or more to write an answer to a question they haven't seen yet.

Well, I'm not American, so I didn't vote ... but the latest numbers I have found are: Harris: 71,781,355 (48.1%) Trump: 75,084,955 (50.3%)

Anyone who voted for Harris was with 71M other people, they're unlikely to feel lonely. As for 'landslide' - Trump's margin over Harris was less than half of Biden's margin over Trump. Still a shellacking, but more a solid victory than a landslide.

And yes, the Democrats should have spent more time on making things better for day-to-day living, but they did manage a soft landing from an inflation spike that was inherited from Trump's inflationary policies coincident with the pandemic supply-chain crunch inflation. The US economy is - right at the moment - in really good shape. Let's see how long before Tariffs Trump can ruin that.

Actually - with enough money poured into solving the problem, arable land won't be a problem - just get several bulk-cargo ships full of soil from once-fertile but now overheated lands and ship it on down. You might need to give it some microbes or whatever, but just put Matt Damon in charge of that.

You would have to wait quite some time for it to be actually warm enough to live comfortably. Meanwhile, 65 years on from "On the Beach", Melbourne would once again be important, as the Heat Line moved inexorably southwards.

That may true or at least relative, but since Down Under is mostly empty anyway, we should all be able to fit on the above-water parts of Antarctica. We'd move from have the Red Centre to having the White Centre.

And then there's the quite reasonable viewpoint that while progressive policies might have outpaced societal comfort, they're unlikely to have done anywhere near as much damage to society as the consistent conservative push to suppress wages, balanced by elevating profits, and reducing income tax on the wealthiest. Inequality is so huge that it is a genuine threat to the stability of society.

Drop the name calling you prick. That's the behaviour since time imemorial - you want to vote for your side and you don't want the other side to get their votes. Human nature.

Of course, in a place where voting is optional, state houses rig gerrymander the districts, and they don't even have the grace to hold the election on a weekend, it certainly helps to not have your opponent's supporters vote.

There's only far an executive order will take you, given that the GOP now control the house, and the Senate was always at the mercy of Oilman Joe Manchin.

Who knew that trying to be efficient was a bad thing? Aside from the fact that energy use can be affected by external events, such as Russia turning off the supply of gas (or them weaning themselves off it), there's been a couple of fairly warm winters, and clearly they've been working on doing more with less for some time if the peak was in 2006.

Mate, your arguments are all over the shop. And you have it arse-about - the EU's economy has lagged and is lagging behind the US for many reasons, and the drop in usage is driven by the weak economy, not the cause of it (y'know - "cause and effect"?). And there's no need to add conspiracy-minded questions - the reason people want countries to stick to the Paris Agreement is that it will reduce the growth in temperature.

Clearly though, you have done little work in atmospheric physics. And a 'call to authority' like that - it just makes you sound like a complete tosser.

Here's something you may not have realised - history is not over yet. There's plenty of time for imminent doom to arrive, especially given the rate of change that's becoming visible.

Where to start with that little lot? Perhaps by removing the stuffing of the strawman argument that we're trying to remove the energy from the system, when any honest person would admit that we're trying to change how we get the energy we use.

Then there's the rubbish argument that CO2 is beneficial as if having some is good so it follows that having much much more is much much better. It's not. Not only is it providing more heat-trapping ability in the atmosphere, but it's also being absorbed by the oceans, leading to a rise in the depth (less deep) of the lysocline, in and below which calcium carbonate (y'know - shells) become unstable and dissolve.

It's a complex issue and regurgitating half baked commentary from idiots does you no credit at all.

Before you go down the socialist utopian route of nearly free power, please give a bit more information around this "subsidize them" throwaway - is that government subsidy (like they already tend to get)? Is it the kind of subsidy that will allow the powerplant owners to actually charge a reasonable amount for the power, or is the subsidy going to appear in the power bills for decades? Once it's up and running, a nuclear powerplant produces cheap & relatively clean energy. But you can't just wave away the startup costs.

You are quite right however on the generally unknown health costs of coal power. Filthy, and deadly with it.

Fair point, since you don't intend to procreate we'll all be better off I think.