The Year That Was

Can you believe it’s January already? 2022 seems to have flown past even quicker than the last.

Before we race headlong into 2023, I thought I’d take a look back at the year that was and reflect on some of the big news stories and amazing breakthroughs that caught my eye and made an impact on me. And it certainly was a huge year.

It feels like it hasn’t stopped raining the entire time, and my heart goes out to all the people throughout the nation who have been negatively affected by all the devastating floods.

I can’t imagine what it must feel like to watch a torrent of muddy water sweep through your home or business, destroying everything in its wake and leaving very little, if anything, to salvage.

It’s heartbreaking to see so many families being displaced with many left homeless for some time to come, given the clean-up has barely begun and more rain is forecast over summer.

Seeing local communities rally to support those in need is the only silver lining to these dark rain-laden clouds. Australians are always incredibly generous with money and time to help those who are doing it tough, and it’s in these most challenging times when we see the Aussie spirit at its best.

I just hope we can put some long-term strategies in place to enable us to harvest much of this excess water and channel it to the parts of the country still in drought.

It turns out that three La Niña weather patterns in a row isn’t the only unusual phenomenon causing this cooler, wetter weather.

It’s believed another climate driver was the underwater volcanic eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai on 15th January 2022, which caused an enormous amount of water and debris to shoot 57 kilometres above Earth going beyond the stratosphere into the mesosphere.

According to Weatherzone’s Joel Pippard, the Tongan volcanic eruption is one of the largest explosions ever recorded by satellites and the strongest volcanic eruption since the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

As a result, over the past few months, the stratosphere around Antarctica has been cooling, and this cooling polar vortex is now starting to influence our weather in the lower atmosphere. Cold fronts are becoming colder and bringing more frequent bursts of cold weather, storms and chills, especially across the southeast of the country.

We celebrated the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in February and sadly farewelled this outstanding Queen in September before welcoming a new King. A new Federal Government and Prime Minister and a new Government and Premier in South Australia were elected, and a new Premier was announced in Tasmania.

It’s been hard to helplessly watch the people in Ukraine bravely battle a war that started back in February after Russian troops invaded the country.

I have been at odds to explain how, in the 21st century, this can still be allowed to happen, and I came across this simple explanation recently that perfectly sums it all up;

Putting Russia and Ukraine in children’s terms….

After the last BIG playground fight (WW2), lots of popular kids (WORLD LEADERS) got together and made a big gang (NATO), and all the kids in the gang made a pinky promise (TREATY) to be nice and respectful and not fight each other anymore.

This means not going into each other’s part of the playground (COUNTRY) without permission, and not throwing sticks or stones (HEAVY ARTILLERY) at each other, and the UK is part of the gang.

But then a new kid (UKRAINE) joined the playground, and a big bad bully (RUSSIA) started picking on the new kid, all because he is greedy and bossy and wanted the new kids playground space for himself, even though he has one of the biggest spaces in the playground.

But sadly, the new kid is not part of the gang because the big bad bully didn’t want the new kid to join the gang.

We would be breaking our pinky promise if any of the gang members help the new kid fight the bully.

We have all told the bully off, and stuck up for the new kid by hiding the bully’s pocket money until the bully stops hurting the new kid (SANCTIONS) and this will hopefully stop the bully from buying more sticks and stones. We have also given the new kid lots of our own sticks and stones to fight the bully, because this is not breaking the pinky promise!

Even though it is really, really sad, all we can do now is stand on the edge of the playground and watch and give moral support to the new kid, because we are not allowed to fight the bully for them; not without breaking the pinky promise.

BUT… if the bully breaks the pinky promise and comes into our part of the playground without permission and throws a stick or stone at us, then the whole of the gang (NATO) will come and help us, and we will ALL jump on top of the bully (RUSSIA) and beat him up.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that but still doesn’t justify what Russia is doing to Ukraine.

A woman leading a volunteer group rushing to rebuild community buildings in a town in Ukraine that were bombed and destroyed, along with the power grid by Russian rockets, was being interviewed by an NBC-TV journalist recently. She explained the group was racing to create warming centres for the locals without power before the heavy snowfall arrives. She put everything in perspective when asked how she felt about the upcoming holidays when she replied;

“Every day is a holiday when you’re alive”.

Now that the Covid cloud cast on everyday life has finally begun to lift somewhat, the economy is slowly recovering and we are learning to live with Covid, it is wonderful to focus on the positive things that were achieved this year.

In September, NASA successfully smashed a spacecraft, known as DART, directly into an asteroid. The aim was to see if such a collision could knock the asteroid off its orbit, which could protect Earth from any future apocalyptic asteroid strikes.

The spacecraft, costing almost $500 million Australian dollars, was directed at the asteroid known as Dimorphos, which was about eleven million kilometres from Earth.

The rocket, which was roughly the size of a vending machine, slammed into the space rock at around 22,500 kilometres an hour, nudging Dimorphos off its previous orbit.

An asteroid is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

My favourite quote of the year was delivered by Elena Adams, DART’s mission systems’ engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, after the success of the world’s first planetary defence test;

“I think Earthlings should sleep better. Definitely, I will.”

Australian scientists have always been revered for their life-changing discoveries and in another world-first, Melbourne-based scientists have this year trained a petri dish of human brain cells to play the vintage video game Pong, which could open a prospective path to artificial intelligence.

The study was published in Neuron, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, where Dr Brett Kagan, lead author and chief scientific officer of biotech start-up company Cortical Labs and his team describe their work as a ‘cyborg brain’. They say it showed signs of feeling – but is much too primitive to have any consciousness. While the score rate was low, the longer the ‘cyborg brain’ played the video game, the more accurately it scored…watch this space.

Meanwhile, I was fascinated to learn that in January 2022, in the US city of Baltimore, Maryland, for the first time ever, surgeons transplanted a pig’s heart into a human.

The donated pig’s heart had been genetically modified to boost the chances of acceptance in a human body.

The recipient is 57-year-old David Bennett, who had been on cardiac support for two months and wasn’t suitable for a mechanical heart pump or a human heart transplant.

In total, the animal had ten genes modified. Four of those were deactivated; one to prevent an aggressive immune response and rejection and one that would otherwise cause the pig’s heart to continue growing after it was transplanted into a human body.

The patient’s recovery is promising because pig hearts are close enough to human hearts in anatomy, and without the transplant he faced certain death.

We have such a low rate of organ donation the world over, maybe this is the way of the future.

And finally, in May, America became the first country in history to achieve pay parity between men’s and women’s soccer teams.

After six years of litigation, the US Soccer Federation agreed to pay their men and women players equally. Let’s hope we can eventually close the gender pay gap in every industry and business.

That’s my year in review, I hope when you reflected on your 2022 you found lots of positive memories.

On Christmas Day I hosted the outside broadcast on 2GB 10:00 – 14:00 from the Uniting Church at Ashfield for the Rev. Bill Crew Foundation, while they served around 3,000 Christmas meals to those in need.

I hope you can tune in either via your AM radio or by downloading the 2GB app where you can listen in anywhere around the globe. I’ll also be hosting Sunday nights 21:00 to midnight for Reverend Bill on 2GB throughout January.

I hope you had a joyful Christmas and I hope 2023 is your best year yet…cheers susie