And so, well aware of this and anxious to hold on to every single one of my several dozen readers, I have only once previously (and that more than a year ago) pointed out that prime minister Scott Morrison's otherwise bewildering inaction on climate change is easily explained by his zealous pentecostalism.

I return to the subject now, spurred by this week's report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and by the prime minister's bovine responses to it. But even now, anxious not to do my own harping lest it cost me some fans, I refer readers to a timely piece by a like-minded someone else just posted on the highly-readable Pearls and Irritations public policy blog. There A.L. Jones asks If true-blue Pentecostalists were in charge what would they do about climate change?

Jones' piece is very lively (his unflattering-to-pentecostalists comparisons of what they believe with what crazed Scientologists believe is very apt and very funny) and comes to this ringing conclusion.

"[So] how would Pentecostalism view the current climate crisis? Sceptically, for a start. Pentecostals are much more sceptical than mainstream Protestants are about its anthropogenic nature. The more religious the believers are, the more sceptical [about climate science]. Pentecostal principles would suggest that climate change is God's will. Furthermore, it is likely to be among God's signs that the cosmic battle [between God and Satan] is at hand.

"Pentecostal logic proceeds flawlessly - albeit from dodgy premises: Because climate change is God's will, we must not meddle with it. If we do, we are defying Him. To defy God is existential folly; we will go to Hell instead of Heaven, which is reserved for God's helpers alone. Because climate activist-meddlers are unknowingly doing the Devil's work, the righteous must do whatever they can to thwart them.

"In short, if true-blue Pentecostals were in charge, they would take no action to mitigate climate change. Not only that, they would also actively intervene to stop those who try.

"Could we have fared that much worse with the Scientologists?" A.L. Jones asks, rhetorically.

Forseeably, astrologers let us down again

Although The Canberra Times' astrology columnist didn't predict Thursday's announcement of the sudden Covid lockdown in retrospect I see there was an eerie prediction of the lockdown in my own behaviour.

For, uncannily, earlier in the week of the lockdown's announcement, I scurried to my E-book provider's E-bookshop to buy the biggest, longest book I have ever owned in my long life of passionate bookishness. So somehow, eerily, I had sensed that there was about to be a week of nothing to do but curl up with a mighty book.

The great big book of my prophetic choice is Richard Zenith's just-published Pessoa: An Experimental Life, a colossal biography of the uniquely brilliant, uniquely eccentric Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935).

Zenith's biography of Pessoa is more than 1000 pages long.

Even your columnist, a focused and athletic reader (and already deep into the book), will need a week to tango through it. Indeed it will not surprise if, given the mystical coincidence of my purchase of the book with the ACT lockdown, I finish the book at 4.59pm next Thursday, just as the planned seven-day lockdown ticks into its last seconds.

But readers, come closer now, for I need to confide in you and don't want all and sundry to hear.

I confess that in spite of my veneer of 21st-century sophistication and although I appear to move through the world of new-fangled devices with aplomb there is one digital phenomenon that brings out the credulous, bewildered, superstitious medieval peasant in me.

Yes, for me the ways that E-Books and E-readers work their magic does seem to me to be literally magic.

Technological explanations of how they work are lost on me in the same way in which one's attempted explanations of the internal combustion engine are lost on one's dog.

This week's purchase of the Pessoa biography illustrates my point. Within five minutes of deciding I just had to have the volume I had bought it online and it was mystically delivered to my flat, slender E-Book there at my elbow. My inner-peasant just cannot understand how this is possible, how a volume can have no palpable volume.

"Where can the book have come from?" he marvels, looking heavenward.

"And how is it able to pass into the E-Reader as effortlessly as a ghost entering a room by gliding through the room's walls?

"And how is it a giant book like this one can somehow arrive in my E-Book's mystical innards (where it joins other giants, including a Complete Works of Shakespeare which as an orthodox book on an orthodox bookshelf is as bulky as a 1.2kg pack of Weet-Bix) without changing the E-book's appearance?

"Why doesn't the E-Reader that has just ingested an E-Book bulge in the same way that, in wildlife documentaries, giant pythons disgustingly bulge after they have swallowed their large prey whole?"

My inner-credulist is bewildered by this but readers you can tell, can't you, from the awe in his voice and from the beatific rapture glowing in his face, that he is thrilled by this mystery.

For even when a man is, like this columnist, a towering agnostic intellectual with a forensically rational mind he often has a voracious secret hankering for a little sorcery, superstition, even religious belief to intoxicate his normally dry, sober life.