II’v just been having an interesting discussion with an old fella I once met mowing his camp spot up near Moree …

He says the reason us youngsters believe all this Climate Change bullshit (here I think he means- Human Enhanced Climate Change) is because we fuck around with the time all the time. It started of with whether the sun was shining through the hole in the Cenotaph down in Victoria at the 11th hour this morning.

I said, “Yes, I suppose so” – not of course having the aged wisdom at my command that this old fella was bringing to the discussion.
“No oo! No,” he says, .. “the dammed sun was shining through the hole at 10 o’clock … Same as you idiots here have New Year at 1am down here on the Harbour Bridge.” He’s a Queenslander, from the East Coast.

I said, “I listened to the Last Post and observed my minute of silence at 11am this morning .. it was on ABC Radio.”
“Bullshit!” he says.
“No, no,” I said, “it was 11am.”. “Not the 11th hour!” he said.

So my youthful wisdom is temporarily stumped. I’ve been contemplating Stephen Jay Gould’s Timeline of Life on Earth over the past week & hadn’t thought through the consequences of this fucking around with the time properly …

That’s the problem, he says. We’ve fucked around with the time so that now we think that this Climate Change crap is real, but it’s really natural change of seasons but were counting the time wrong. We’re moving them around with daylight savings.

I said, “But even then we haven’t lost or gained a year yet with daylight savings .. have we?” Stephen Jay Gould’s 3.5 billion year timeline flitting away here. “How long have we had daylight savings” … I should know this. “Even 30 years, if we kept it all year round, would only add a month.”.
He says, “A month is 28 days …”
“A Telstra month,” I say, “a Corporate month & our calender adjusts this with a leap year.”

“There you go” he says, “every 4 years Telstra should give you a free day.” – he’s a Queenslander, remember. “Oh they’d love that” I say, “they take two months of us every year as it is!”
“Yeah, and that’s what I mean” says he, “that’s where you youngsters get fucked up with this Climate Change bullshit.”

I like him, he’s got a nice old dog .. but I’m still a little confused. He has all the qualities of a neoLiberal Prime Ministerial advisor.
Still, that 3.5 billion years of continuous life on Earth still bothers me .. Stephen Jay Gould says it only has to touch the zero baseline, even for a millisecond, and life on Earth ends.

” .. and with the going down of the sun, we shall remember.”