I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.

As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.

For the past several weeks, I have delved deeply into the content produced by scientific climate change deniers. By "denier" I mean those who argue that global warming is below the range expected by mainstream studies and by "scientific" I mean that handful of actual active researchers in climatology, rather than unqualified opinions. Without exclusion, I've found that these scientific deniers engage in extraordinary selection biases, unfounded speculations, and flawed logic. But, to the untrained eye, I can certainly see how they could be convincing; they appeal to ideological confirmation biases and, of course, they appeal to certain vested interests. Their influence is profound; there are very few climatology journal articles that are in the denier category, but the content makes up the overwhelming majority of related advertorials. The result is a profound disparity between an misinformed public opinion compared to scientific research, which, in a capitalist democracy, is reflected in the politics of demagoguery.

Two days ago, the World Meteorological Organization reported the largest recorded level of atmospheric CO2 and the largest increase in a single year (a reminder that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a very long time). It follows Trump's decision to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Agreement, which sought to preferably limit global warming this century to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, with a long-term objective of below 2.0 degrees. As COP30 approaches it increasingly becomes clear that voluntary agreements to a global problem is biased toward unenforceable lobbying even when adaptive and mitigative technologies exist and even when our first major tipping point (coral reef losses) looms, a situation that has been warned about for years even as fossil fuel subsidies increase - your taxes at work.

I am now in my third year as a climatology postgraduate, after many years of debating the issue and engaging in autodidactic research. When I started formal studies, it quickly became apparent to me that, despite international agreements and technological change, the most accurate trajectory was the RCP8.5 scenario; high-emissions, high-growth, high-population, the highest plausible temperature increase, i.e., the worst case scenario. Maybe it's the risk engineer disposition in me, but I think we should prepare against worst-case scenarios, especially when the costs are high. The problem is that they are so incremental; people understand the accretion of warming as explained by the popular metaphor of the "boiling frog" story that describes how people do not effectively react to creeping changes. Whilst it is a strong and appropriate metaphor, it is also a myth. A frog will react when the water is too hot for comfort. But I wonder whether humans are as clever as a frog.