When the flak gets intense, you know you’re on target

And note especially that a hypothesis doesn’t care who believes in it, right up to and including environment ministers, heads of state and presidents of distinguished scientific academies. Rather, science requires that to be successful a hypothesis only needs to be clearly stated, understandable, have explanatory power and withstand testing. It takes one person, not an army, to accomplish that, and the names of those one persons pass down through history - Charles Darwin, Wilhelm Roentgen, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Robin Warren-Barry Marshall and their like, mavericks one and all. God bless them.

Despite this reality, every day we find public figures on Australian television and radio stations muttering about there being “a consensus” on dangerous, human-caused climate change, or that the science of global warming “is settled”.

Such persons should be referred to the nearest psychologist, and gently dissuaded from inflicting their nonsense - for that is what it is - on the poor public. Science is never settled, and it is about hypothesis testing against known facts, not arm-waving about imaginary futures that have been created by playstation-4 computer buffs. Consensus nonsensus.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out that our infantryman’s name wasn’t Einstein. It was Durkin. Martin Durkin, and what a service he has rendered.