Shorten noted "hoopla and showmanship" in the joint announcement by the PUP leader, Clive Palmer, and the climate crusader Al Gore on carbon policy last week, but emphasised "significant points of climate consensus" including the retention of the renewable energy target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and the Climate Change Authority.
At the extreme, this could trigger one of the more catastrophic "tipping points" of climate change - the switching-off of the "thermohaline circulation" which brings warm water from the Tropics to the northern Atlantic and sends cooler Arctic waters south - events which were dramatised, if somewhat fancifully, in the film The Day After Tomorrow.
I'll tell ya' - it's totally hilarious, and will have you tearing with laughter if not rolling on the floor by the end, even as it gets across major points of climate change.
"There are lots of encouraging signs here but $100bn a year is still peanuts and while we do believe renewables hold the key to tackling climate change we are slightly sceptical that we have reached some kind of tipping point," said Charlie Kronick, head of climate and energy campaign at Greenpeace.
But on the finer points of climate-change policy, the candidates reflect the predilections of their parties.
The disruption marks the halfway point of the climate talks.
Second, the speech made a particular point of highlighting climate change, and the path to sustainability.
"Really from a psychological point of view, climate change looks like the problem from hell", says cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman in this week's podcast.
Famous as the juncture between Asia and Europe, Istanbul is also the meeting point of the climate systems of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which means that a diverse plant life complements its rich history.
The whole point of the climate debate we've been having this past decade or so has been how we reduce the emissions from power generation and how to calculate and factor in the environmental cost of coal generation.
