This morning, Alan Jones laid out what Tony Abbott had to do to become Australia’s next Prime Minister. It’s really quite simple, if you’re a nutter, a crackpot and a lunatic:
The Independents have to go “in the chaff bag” with Gillard, Brown and others…
The Liberals are for the “battlers”; not the banks, the miners, the billionaires and their contributors from the top end of town
Alan gave Tony just enough time to spruik his visit to a Queensland fruit factory, in his campaign against the Queensland Labor Bligh government, and then made Tony promise that the Coal Seam Gas industry will leave prime agricultural land alone.
Tony, the neoliberal lickspittle that he is, agreed. Why not? He can always say he changed his mind later, which he undoubtedly will.
Listen to this excerpt from the show. I hope you like conservative loonies dictating the terms of their electoral success (or otherwise) to other conservative loonies, because there’s not much else to this verbal assault:
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Tony Abbott isn’t just a one-man band. He’s a one-man Tea Party. He’s all those nutty Republican presidential contenders rolled into one. As batty as Bachmann, as preposterous as Perry or Palin. As much of a fruit as Newt.
Come on Libs – admit it. You’re as alarmed by him as our side of politics. He doesn’t have policies. He does performances. Politics as street theatre. All photo-op and agit-prop. Ad-libbed? His policy pronouncements are mad-libbed. Tony Abbott will offer ungoverned government – a Federal Ungovernment. We may well look back to Gillard as to a golden age.
I accept that all political leaders are half mad. But with Tony it’s both halves. While his eccentricities give him an authenticity, even a likability that the “real Julia” lacks, they’re surely more appropriate to a shock jock than a prime minister.
When Alan Jones retires, Tony would be great doing breakfast on 2GB.
There’s one resounding issue for me, which remains unaddressed by these two lunatics:
Is the Liberal Party, headed by the climate change denier Tony Abbott, qualified to lead Australia into a carbon-free future?
A very clever animated documentary from Incubate Pictures, that lays out the challenges to “business as usual” that society faces over the next century. The decisions that we make within the next 50 years will seal the fate of the human race.
This movie was an enormous undertaking, and the authors should be congratulated for their effort to bring these issues to the attention of the public. The author speaks about the video here. From Incubate Pictures and the Post Carbon Institute.
The University of Wisconsin recently hosted a debate between Dr. Tad Patzek, incoming president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (USA), and former CEO of Shell Oil Company and domestic drilling proponent John Hofmeister. These guys talk like old mates on the “oil patch”, and they only get excited when talking about the failure of the US political system and the inevitability of rising oil (read petrol) prices.
Hofmeister wants to drill the planet senseless and give everyone an iPad and a plasma screen, while Patzek’s solution remains ethereal and poorly communicated. Patzek is supremely qualified, but lacks the “zing” of a great peak oil presenter. There’s no clear winner here, and not much point to the debate either. Much ado about nothing, IMO.
The past decade has been the hottest ever recorded since global temperature records began 150 years ago. This video from NASA discusses the impacts of the sun’s energy, Earth’s reflectance and greenhouse gasses on global warming. Other NASA videos…
Australian climate change contrarian Robert M. Carter, Ph.D., and Liberal-aligned think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs, have been named in documents leaked from key US climate change denial organisation The Heartland Institute to DeSmogBlog. Carter apparently receives US$1,667 per month, funding which is provided to “high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message”. Other recipients are US-based skeptic Craig Idso and serial contrarian Fred Singer.
Download links for the leaked documents are below. More info from Skeptical Science.
On Dr. Carter’s Heartland Institute page it states that “…he receives no research funding from special interest organizations such as environmental groups, energy companies or government departments.” I wonder who will believe that disclaimer now?
Literally. Flying all over the world, to anti-climate science conferences, hobknobbing with the cream of the Liberal Party, and publishing off-beat science in an attempt to sway the climate debate. Considering the outstandingly positive PR Bob must get for the University, it makes me wonder why they don’t appoint him boss-cocky? Chancellor or something?
Why, Bob could specialise in a whole new “ideological” approach to science. Forget physics, forget chemistry, forget physical theory; just publish stuff that suits your political and social ideology! Real-life “talk to the hand” science that lets people know where you stand. Golly, people would probably flock to the courses! (OK, mainly conservatives…)
And Bob’s awesome reputation for scientific rigour, unwavering ethics and integrity would assist the University get the very best people. Chancellor Carter. Now that’s a plan!
What a woeful scheme. Did Kevin Rudd imagine that coal fired energy producers would get involved in the cost of carbon capture and storage without either (a) sufficient industry incentives or (b) a high enough price on CO2 emissions? Nobody wants to fund this transition, let alone the vested fossil fuel interests. Video from the ABC’s 7.30 Report…
Yesterday, Alan Jones rolled out another climate change skeptic for the pleasure of his listeners, this time the libertarian conservative journalist and author James Delingpole, who blogs for the UK Telegraph, the right-wing newspaper so beloved of Tory politicians. It was the usual rant from both men, with Jones stating that irradiation from “the sun” is the cause of climate change, not carbon dioxide. This has been debunkedthoroughly.
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Jones announced Delingpole’s intention to come to Australia (lucky us!) and recycled the usual ideological arguments against climate change; that it’s some sort of lefty communist hoax, etc, etc. Jones wound up the exchange with a wild and shrill statement that “we” (he and Delingpole, I guess) are making the world “a better place”, while the proponents of anthropogenic climate change are trying to make the world “uglier, poorer and less free”.
We should probably expect more conservative radio and press angst, as Delingpole’s visit nears and the conservative echo chamber of Jones, Bolt and Akerman gets fully wound up. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Delingpole’s name was added to the “independent advisers” list on the Galileo Movement’s website, where Jones is Patron. After all, Delingpole certainly qualifies as a person “with diverse life experience”, and he’s certainly a skeptic.
We can expect even more from James, as he has taken to writing about peak oil, another subject he has little knowledge of. We shouldn’t expect anything but business as usual, however, as James has admitted that he is no scientist; rather that he is “an interpreter of interpretations”, whatever that means. Here’s James on YouTube, explaining himself:
For Delingpole, like Jones, this is an “ideological war”. So much for the science, again…
Here’s another doozy from YouTube. Alex Jones, another well known libertarian and conspiracy theorist, discusses with Delingpole the push from the “murderous control freaks”, “nazis” and “world government” proponents in the banks, corporations and government to euthanise us all and rule the world. If James Delingpole truly believes this claptrap, he’s just another skeptical nutter on Sydney’s airwaves.
Furthermore, if Delingpole’s the best Alan Jones can do, in his on-going war against the science of climate change, his campaign’s hit a new low. Maybe he should work to bring back the peerless Christopher Monckton? At least I get a good laugh out of him…
Barry Brook, Gus Nathan and Kim Talus discuss the possibility of a nuclear future for Australia (note that this debate occurred prior to the carbon tax). From the ABC’s Big Ideas program, via YouTube. See more information on my YouTube Channel…
Just noticed this on YouTube. It was so loopy yet amusing I had to post it. I think it must be satire, but I was unable to find out much about the short or the filmmaker. Enjoy…
It’s looking like one of these fellows may be the next Australian Prime Minister. Yet can either of them understand some simple graphs? It doesn’t look like it. And it doesn’t look like either can understand the idea of a “decadal trend” either. In fact, neither look like they can understand the difference between the weather and climate change!
Here are some recent graphs from the NASA Goddard Institute. They were published on January 18, 2012 by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato and Ken Lo. They show the global surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980 base period for (a) the 12-month running mean, and (b) the 60-month and 132-month running means. In simple terms they show the mean temperature changes for (a) one year, and (b) 5 and 11 year periods (click here, or on the graph to study a larger version).
Now, some people have been talking about a “cooling trend” over the past decade, including our prospective Prime Minister. Yet, once the natural variability is averaged out, as it has been in the 5 and 11 year running means, no cooling trend is apparent.
There is a cooling trend between 1940 and 1950, during and after World War 2, and there is a plateau between about 1960 and 1970, but the trend from then on is a consistent warming trend, readily apparent in the 5 and 11 year means.
Now, let’s look at the solar irradiance for the past decade. It has actually fallen, and because of the ocean’s thermal inertia, global temperature change can be expected to lag the solar irradiance by around 18 months. So the influence of the sun between 2002 and 2010 continued to be a cooling effect. Over the next 3-5 years, as solar forcing now increases, the sun’s influence will change rapidly to a warming effect.
OK, what about the El Niño-La Niña cycle we’ve heard about? Does that help us examine whether global warming has “stopped” in the past decade, or at least slowed down from the rate of the prior two decades? Let’s take a look at the graph and see.
We can see the relationship between the 1998 and 2011 El Niño and higher temperatures. The 1997-1998 “El Niño of the century” had a timing that maximized 1998 global temperature, but in contrast, the 2011 global temperatures were dragged down by a strong La Niña. From this we can surmise that if the 2011 El Niño had equalled that in 1998, the warming would have been much more apparent.
Now I’m no climate scientist. I’m not even that smart. Yet I don’t find it particularly hard to understand these graphs, the ideas behind them, and how these ideas interact.
I also find it easy to understand that emitting 30 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year cannot go on forever, without serious environmental problems. Even considering my limited knowledge of chemistry and physics, I can understand we are running a dangerous experiment with the only atmosphere and planet we will ever have.
But neither of our prospective Prime Ministers get it. They apparently can’t see from a very simple graph that our global mean temperatures have been steadily rising for a century. They also fail to grasp that temperatures will rise still further, even if we were to stop emitting all CO2 into the atmosphere tomorrow.
So, what’s got the climate change skeptics excited? What exactly is the cause of the “global cooling” rumours you constantly read in the papers and hear on radio, from the likes of Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Miranda Devine, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley and others? It’s simple. It’s that tiny little plateau at the top of the (b) 60 month running mean graph (in red). Here’s the graph again so you can check it out in all its glory.
All that noise, bluster and conservative angst over a brief anomally, caused by lower solar irradiance and a strong La Niña cooling effect. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear from some real climate scientists; James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato and Ken Lo:
2011 was only the ninth warmest year in the GISS analysis of global temperature change, yet nine of the ten warmest years in the instrumental record (since 1880) have occurred in the 21st century. The past year has been cooled by a moderately strong La Niña.
The 5-year (60-month) running mean global temperature hints at a slowdown in the global warming rate during the past few years. However, the cool La Niña phase of the cyclically variable Southern Oscillation of tropical temperatures has been dominant in the past three years, and the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data occurred over the past half dozen years.
We conclude that the slowdown of warming is likely to prove illusory, with more rapid warming appearing over the next few years.
Now that’s not too hard to understand, is it? We’ve seen a small plateau in warming, but we expect the temperatures to increase again in the next few years, due to rising emissions and natural cyclic changes. Even a really dumb guy or two could understand that…
Now ask yourself the obvious question. Can we trust our future to someone who’s too dumb to get the best advice from the best people, yet too stubborn and intractable to consider it seriously, even when it’s been given to him?
Can we trust the future to a man who has been so thoroughly influenced by the climate change skeptics, that he has even misinformed students in an Adelaide school that “it was considerably warmer when Jesus was alive”. A man that is so conflicted that he has a climate change mitigation policy for science he chooses not to believe in?
Malcolm Turnbull would be a far better bet than someone who’s just plain dumb.
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So, where does Tony Abbott get his climate change advice? Look no further than the “independent advisors” to the Galileo Movement, a range of climate change skeptics from around the world, assembled by various conservative interests (including patron Alan Jones) to fight against the Labor government’s carbon tax.
Here I have listed them, with links to their listing at Sourcewatch, a website that collects documented information on the “corporations, industries, and people trying to influence public policy and public opinion”. Click the links for more information.
Now, perhaps some Australian conservatives wish to emulate their Republican relatives in the US Congress, and carry on a war against climate science, because it’s some sort of socialist, world government, redistribute-the-wealth-to-the-poor sort of conspiracy thing, run by evil, greedy scientists out to game the system. But that’s all bullshit.
The science underlying climate change is the most comprehensive, thorough, worldwide, collaborative scientific effort in mankind’s history. The basic science is schoolroom physics, and undisputed by any respected scientist. The temperature rises are observable facts, and therefore incontestable. Climate change is happening – and like it or not – mankind is responsible.
It’s time Tony Abbott grew up, took some personal responsibility for his own high-carbon lifestyle, and stopped listening to the wrong people. He’s appearing more and more like a wingnut every day; and a dangerous one at that. If he’s unwilling to do that, then he should just get out of the way for Malcolm Turnbull, who understands the science.
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Here’s a good example of the sort of nonsense these “skeptics” get up to. The conservative columnist Andrew Bolt recently wrote an article for the Herald Sun titled “Temperatures lower”. In it he featured a professional-looking temperature graph and claimed that “…the global temperature for January was below the 30-year average. I really don’t think global warming is happening as predicted”. Pretty convincing stuff, right?
Unfortunately, the temperature graph was only for global lower tropospheric temperatures, not global land-ocean temperatures such as Hansen et al. measure above. So it was not a measurement of the complete climate system; just part if it – a part that is particularly sensitive to the La Niña (cooling) effect. Obviously, this is highly misleading to the readers and unhelpful in the overall debate.
But this is what these conservative commentators do. They don’t have to prove their case in science, because they hardly ever have one. Bolt’s just trying to spread the seed of scientific doubt – to reduce the public’s trust in the international scientific consensus – as that is all he needs to do to achieve his objectives.
I expect this from conservative commentators, who are by their very nature sparing with the truth. I expect a lot more from a prospective Prime Minister.
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