Global warming a hoax? No, the hoax claim is a hoax…

Interesting.

See Global warming a hoax? No, the hoax claim is a hoax. Rush Limbaugh fell for it, though, as did several others who profess to be skeptical of global warming.

I live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth…

Or so we tell people. That’s Fort Denison, in the early days of the colony a punishment island nicknamed “Pinchgut” and then in the 1850s the fort was built to defend Sydney Harbour against a Russian invasion. Something to do with the Crimean War, I think.

Well no Russians came.

But today Fort Denison really is under siege: Fort Denison to be protected against rising sea.

The historic Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour will be restored to improve the structural base of the fort, which is is being eroded as a result of changing sea levels.

The New South Wales Government is investing $1.5 million to replace the sandstone blocks around the base of the fort.

Restoration work will begin next week and will take up to 12 months to complete.

New South Wales Minister for Environment Phil Koperberg says the restoration work will ensure future generations can visit the heritage-listed site.

“It is structurally sound but unless some work is done now, then ultimately given the weight of the fortification, which is over 150 years old, then ultimately these lower block of sandstone will give way as a result of constant erosion,” he said.

“This work is designed to prevent that from happening.

“It [the work] won’t change the look because what the work that will be carried out comprises is the replacement of those huge sandstone blocks which are at the very base of the fortification and most exposed to salt and wave action and rising water levels.”

Climate change sinks embattled troglodytes

Poor Tim Blair. Poor Miranda. Increasingly they look like flat earthists geocentrists* in a post-Galileo world.

See the report Hot, parched and sinking – apocalypse Sydney in today’s Herald, but even more importantly go to Climate change in Australia: “Climate Change in Australia was developed by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology in partnership with the Australian Greenhouse Office through the Australian Climate Change Science Program.”

Vital reading

1. The Herald series on migrant workers continues to unearth disturbing stories: A lonely death among the pines and Calls for action to save foreign employees. Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews adopts the legalistic Mary Poppins position: “the workers could freely complain about their employment conditions.” That is making several assumptions about the actual power such workers have culturally, socially and linguistically, and is ignoring on-the-ground factors such as access to such mechanisms and isolation.

2. There is a real stoush happening in Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s electorate over the Gunns pulp mill project in the Tamar Valley in Tasmania. Opposition spokesman Peter Garrett is also in the frame. You may read the article that inspired Geoffrey Cousins to take on the Tasmanian Government, the Howard Government, and the Rudd Opposition at The Monthly: scroll down to Richard Flanagan’s “Out of Control” (May 2007) — and stay on that site to read some other articles while you are there. I am so glad The Monthly now gives free access to some of their excellent essays.

3. Through an ad on The Monthly site I went to High & Dry – that is a generous extract from the book — by Guy Pearse.

At last: a right-wing blog that doesn’t make me want to curl up and die…

Most right-wing blogs I read are simply execrable, cheer-leading, in the main, for the pooling of bigotry and stereotypes, and for some of the more lamentably self-satisfied trends in society, a word many of them would reject. This is especially true of US right-wing blogs, but Australia has its share, some of them sadly only too popular — or should that be populist?

So with great pleasure I introduce (courtesy of WordPress and its what’s hot links) a European blog of considerable merit, which is not to say I endorse absolutely everything on it. It is, however, a blog to be savoured. Click to visit.

 

It isn’t just their good taste in templates either. Here are two entries that I have enjoyed so far:

• Science and Islam
• Global-Warming Deniers: $

The truth about denial

I commend The Bulletin/Newsweek for The truth about denial.

…Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”

Environment and more…

Recently — I forget how — I stumbled into Sprol: Worst Places in the World. Using Google Earth images, it explores the effects of all manner of impacts of mining, deforestation, water use, and more — it extends to such matters as prisons and migration. Explore it, and you may never be the same.

There are a number of items with resonance for us here in Australia:

Three hot issues

No pun intended in the first case…

Hot issue 1: Climate change

I received a lovely email after commenting on another blog which had been (I thought) unduly impressed by that rather scurrilous documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Consequently I have updated and expanded the post to which I have been directing people from that little box at the top of the sidebar, and renamed it: Miranda asks a question or two about climate change. You may read the email there now along with some of the best scientific, as distinct from political or ideological, arguments against The Great Global Warming Swindle that I have been able to find. They are not hard to find. Indeed I am amazed that people like Miranda Devine and Tim Blair still think there is a debate! It is of course true that human activity is not the sole cause of climate change, but it is clear that it has been a very significant factor in the past half century and will be an even more significant factor in the future, but even more to the point, this is a factor about which something may be done. Sceptics (and you perhaps) will be amused by the ally I have found on the question: Margaret Thatcher… I got the heads up on that one from an interview with James Lovelock of Gaia fame on ABC Radio National the other day.

Comments on that post have been re-opened for a short period, say a month.

Climate change

Lovely irony, ABC! Running Bolivian Meltdown tonight on Foreign Correspondent and The Great Global Warming Swindle on Thursday… And do visit that link where you will learn from Sir John Houghton, a top meteorologist and former Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, why that “controversial” exercise is wrong on just about every scientific point it makes.

Meanwhile, in Bolivia, as we are seeing tonight:

ABC embraces swindle; Compass a must

Yes, that header is a link. This is being shown, amidst considerable controversy, on Thursday night. Fortunately it is not being shown naked, but with a following panel discussion, which makes the package worth seeing. In the side-bar under Site News you will see a link to a very authoritative refutation of the major points raised in the documentary.

Hey, don’t buy it!

John Howard’s scare campaign, that is. I Journalspaced on this yesterday. Then note:

Prime Minister John Howard says Labor environment spokesman Peter Garrett supports a 20 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

“That’s pretty drastic and that would send the country into recession,” Mr Howard said.

On Macquarie Radio, federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull attacked Labor for promising to cut its emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. “It is fanatically motivated*,” he said. “They are obsessed. It has become a new religion for them.”

Of course Peter Garrett ACTUALLY said something rather different to the lie Howard and company are currently peddling — and let me add I think the Labor Party are still out of date on nuclear energy, lest you think I agree with them on principle.

No time for [climate] change — Prime Minister

John Howard received a standing ovation from the party faithful when he announced today “that it’s not time for a change in government.” Well, isn’t that surprising? Almost as surprising as this:

We are in danger now of having quite a sensible debate on global warming, simply because only the most determined troglodyte (and Tim) is actually a sceptic now. Marian Wilkinson expresses doubts about the Howard approach and I think rightly points to its prime motivation. Howard does seem to have had a committee charged with delivering the least unacceptable answers, though I really should read the report — and I will. Paul Kelly, on the other hand — and he isn’t a fool — sees it as An emissions blueprint for the world to follow.

I can’t help having the following very unoriginal gut feelings:

Climate change — beyond John, Tim, Miranda — and even Al…

… and yet not Left as some might conceive it.

I am still processing a heap of new stuff that is coming my way, but not from the Americans. All I can confidently say is that it is worth looking into. There are names here that in my ignorance I had never even heard of, and yet at least one of these is a name that John Howard must surely have heard of — and what a gloriously British name it is! Sir Crispin Tickell. “Coldstream Guards, diplomat, Ambassador to Mexico and the United Nations during the 1991 Gulf War. Sir Crispin was warden of Green College, Oxford between 1990 and 1997, when he made George Monbiot a fellow. Tickell wrote Margaret Thatcher’s speech on global climate change…”

Hubris

Overbearing pride or presumption. John Howard’s favourite word of late, as in: Don’t you come in here [Kevin Rudd] with your puffed-up hubris and start lecturing this side of the House.

Pardon me while I pick myself up off the floor!

A Google search for John Howard hubris brings up 401,000 results, with tag lines like:

• If John Howard has this in mind for 2006, he’s not showing it – yet. But hubris? Gloating? That’s been there in spades from his front and back benches…
• FOR a man who eschews hubris, John Howard was drowning in it yesterday. First, there was ill-disguised arrogance when asked about Government’s ads…
• Howard’s hubris may contain the seeds of his demise (The Age, September 4, 2003)…
• The hubris of Howard will eventually trip our government up…
• One of the most grating lines that John Howard has wheeled out ad nauseam over the … believe the Rodent is “losing touch” and showing signs of “hubris”. …
• But John Howard, barely concealing his routine triumphal hubris, has bent over backwards to assure Australians that he has “no desire to extend Commonwealth …
• Now the treasurer confirmed that, in fact, John Howard (then a failed former leader), … the prime minister had accused his deputy of hubris and arrogance. …
• Hubris has gone to John Howard’s head, or in other words, he has “lost the plot”. He thinks he is such a good politician that he can sell refrigerators to …
• One of the secrets of John Howard’s political success is that he made a close study of … the final phase of the Keating era saw similar acts of hubris. …

You get the drift.

Miranda asks a question or two on climate change

Yes, that banner is a link.

Why shouldn’t we be told humans produce a small fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere each year, compared with volcanoes, bacteria, animals, rotting vegetation and the oceans?

That is in Miranda’s damp squib defence of “The Great Global Warming Swindle, a science-backed [sic] rebuttal of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.” I’ll let notoriously non-Marxist Christian Sir John Houghton, a top meteorologist and former Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, reply. You can download his PDF Global Warming, Climate Change and Sustainability: Challenge to Scientists, Policy-makers and Christians (3.9 mb).

5. Volcanic eruptions emit more carbon dioxide than fossil fuel burning – NOT TRUE. In fact, none of the large volcanic eruptions over the last 50 years feature in the detailed record of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Next question. Miranda?

Claims ABC told to screen program…

THE ABC board has been accused of pressuring ABC TV to broadcast a discredited British documentary questioning the science behind climate change.

The ABC announced on Tuesday it had bought The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary that says humans are not to blame for rising global temperatures. The program caused controversy when it was aired on Britain’s Channel 4 in March. Eminent scientists and some of the scientists interviewed later accused the documentary makers of using fabricated data, half-truths and misleading statements.

The ABC science journalist and broadcaster Robyn Williams, who advised the TV division not to buy the program, told the Herald yesterday the director of ABC TV, Kim Dalton, had intimated in a conversation that he was under pressure from the board on the issue… — Sydney Morning Herald

Given what that Board is like thanks to John Howard, this is hardly surprising. I hope they follow it up with an appropriate panel discussion.

A good person to whom even the Board could hardly object is John Houghton: “John Houghton … has been deeply involved with the subject of human-induced climate change for some years. He was professor in atmospheric physics in Oxford, then was Director General of the UK Met Office from where he became involved in the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the first chairman of the IPCC’s scientific assessment.” He is also a devout Christian. The link takes you to an earlier entry where I point you to Houghton’s “fisking” of this very documentary.