because big government is not the answer

A planet in peril, or a society?

On ABC’s QandA political affairs program last Monday, aside from GetUp!’s Simon Sheikh’s collapse, we were privilege to the dulcet tones of Climate Change minister, Greg Combet.

A major part of his reassuring argument is that the government simply cannot ignore the warnings of all the world’s top scientists.

Noted empirical evidence – namely that we haven’t seen any warming in at least ten years – was dismissed as a rubbish argument.

No, Combet smoothly argued the scientists had to be trusted.

So? Who?

The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Even they’ve admitted they are just another UN body, and certainly not the “gold standard”.

They admitted they don’t necessarily promote views of the world’s “top scientists”, but rather, make sure every geographic region is represented as equally as possible.

Sorry, but that’s not the world’s top scientists.

No Frakking Consensus:

Leading scientists. Top climate scientists. The best scientific minds. That was the fiction. Now, at long last, the IPCC is admitting that its authors don’t, in fact, all belong to the highest echelons of the scientific community. Instead we’re advised that the IPCC has “always sought” to “achieve geographic representation.”

The end of Chapter 5 in my book reads:

Journalists say we should trust the IPCC’s conclusions because its reports have been written by the world’s finest scientific minds. But in order for that to be the case the IPCC would need to apply very different criteria when selecting its authors.

It would need an explicit policy that says something along the lines of: Even though we are a UN body, we are not influenced by UN diversity concerns. We select the world’s best experts and only the world’s best experts – regardless of where they come from or what gender they happen to be.

In fact, readers may recall that the crux of the IPCC argument, the one governments such as our own are rolling with (OK, well basically just ours), was written by a teenage boy.

The blurb:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) performs one of the most important jobs in the world. It surveys climate science research and writes a report about what it all means. This report is informally known as the Climate Bible.

Cited by governments around the world, the Climate Bible is the reason carbon taxes are being introduced, heating bills are rising, and costly new regulations are being enacted. It is why everyone thinks carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous. Put simply: the entire planet is in a tizzy because of a United Nations report.

What most of us don’t know is that, rather than being written by a meticulous, upstanding professional in business attire, the Climate Bible is produced by a slapdash, slovenly teenager who has trouble distinguishing right from wrong.

This expose, by an investigative journalist, is the product of two years of research. Its conclusion: almost nothing we’ve been told about the IPCC is true.

So?

Who?

What top climate scientists? Could Combet quote one? A credible one?

The “father” of global warming Gaia theory, perhaps?

No. Remember, James Lovelock came out recently and admitted much of the doom and gloom he’d forecast simply isn’t and hasn’t turned out to be the case.

Unfortunately, not so many other climate scientists are as free to revise their views as Lovelock is. You see, he doesn’t require government funding to keep him afloat.

That is a significant catch 22 that simply cannot be dismissed.

So?

Who?

Australia’s very own Climate Commissioner, Tim Flannery, who the government pays $180,000 per year for three days work per week?

Well, this is a bloke who predicted permanent drought for Australia’s three major eastern coastal cities.

Now the dams are as good as full, and the desal plants have been mothballed – at a cost of considerable billions.

So? Who?

That other government-paid climate expert, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who predicted our thriving reefs would be wiped out by now?

Who, Combet? Who, Gillard?

Who are they, are they on your payroll, and have any of their predictions come true?

Of course, their argument is bunkum, like as if a trace gas, of which humans produce only a fraction of, somehow drives global climate.

Hence, you’ll see more arguments like GetUp!’s Simon Sheikh’s; that being, “to rise above the politics”, like he said on QandA last Monday.

You see, to them, it was never about the science, even though that’s of course what they claimed and possibly what they also believed to a point.

And when the science started riding home, the hard empirical data that refuted the models, they argued it was time to “move on from that”.

OK. So we’re back to the political argument many claimed it always was?

Oh no, now it’s “let’s rise above the politics”.

Utterly vacuous words and sentiments. Deceitful, too – and perhaps to themselves the most.

People like Sheikh I do believe mean well. But he’s trying to change the way the world works because essentially, he doesn’t understand how the world works (and he must have been asleep in history class).

I would argue, however, that he does see genuine problems such as real pollution but has unfortunately, like many of our politicians and scientists, been caught up in CO2=pollution nonsense hypothesis.

He’s stuck.

He, like the other 50,000 delegates at the Rio+20 convention, have made and staked their careers on this.

Families to feed.

For example, what would he and his wife, Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) chairperson, Anna Rose, do if this all came unravelled?

What would Combet do?

What would Flannery do?

What would Gillard do?

Looking at the big picture, that is hardly important. It’s what they’ve done, what they’re doing, and what they will do before time is up that actually matters in the broader sense.

Larry Pickering:

Now we know what Emerson’s “Whyalla” rendition was all about. It was a “get that up ya” celebration which wasn’t directed at us at all. He had already lost us.

Gillard’s old bed mate, Emerson, was serenading Abbott alone in a taunting display of ridicule.

*You know, if they’d actually just made it a big money-go-round – not a take from the rich, give to the poor – but an actual money-go-round, and admitted it as simply as that, something that might have stimulated the economy, I’d probably be half for it…*

Also, if this carbon tax did ANYTHING to lower global temperatures, then they might have a sliver of an argument. That said, the whole world could adopt it and not even Tim Flannery claims it would make an iota of difference.

Their argument of, “So what? We do nothing?” is fallacious. By wasting so much time, money, and endeavour on the carbon caper, there is in fact a lot we are not doing that we should be doing again.