It’s hard to ignore resurgence of the ‘Australia shouldn’t do anything until everyone else does’ meme, most recently by the National Party. Dennis provides another variation on the theme, spinning this fair and balanced question in the latest Newspoll:
Currently, the federal government intends to introduce the carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2010. Under the carbon pollution reduction scheme, the price of energy sources, such as petrol, electricity and gas may become more expensive. Do you think the federal government should delay or should not delay the introduction of the carbon pollution reduction scheme beyond 2010 because of the recent financial crisis?
Push poll much?
Climate Denialism is usually shorthand for someone who denies the truth of the basic science of global warming, but I think a more relevant redefinition is Climate Recalcitrant - someone who doesn’t believe that we can get organised to do something about the problem. What the Nationals and Dennis have in common are a desire to trash 15 years of global negotiations, bury their heads in the sand and yell ‘head for the hills (or the barracks)’! Continue reading ‘Climate Denialism whack-a-mole’
Warning: snark ahead
According to last night’s Lateline, “A growing number of bloggers are now using the internet to attack the science of global warming. Written by climate change sceptics, the blogs are hosting a new scientific debate over whether the world has become hotter or colder during the past ten years.”
The reporter’s evidence for this “new scientific debate”? Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy. You know, Bolt. The long-serving columnist with a regular gig in the Herald-Sun and Insiders. And Marohasy, the IPA employee whose glass-half-full schtick on the environment has been making its way into the mainstream media for many years. Both do run blogs (in Bolt’s case, to give him credit, he does genuinely blog in a way that most journalists haven’t tried), but the idea that they are in any way new voices on the scene is complete rot. And their “new scientific debate”? A rehashed version of the “world is cooling” nonsense - based on a high-schooler’s level of data analysis - that they’ve been running for years, which as Paul noted has been debunked in detail by any number of experts.
Note to John Stewart (the Lateline reporter, not the Daily Show host): just because somebody says it on the Internet doesn’t make it new, scientific, or interesting. And if you really want to report on climate change blogging, might I suggest there’s a whole other world of it out there that’s been doing a whole lot better covering not only the problem, but the merits of the various solutions, than your program has managed?
My attention has been drawn to a blog piece by Andrew Bolt which purports to show graphical evidence to support the central dogma of the Stupid Cult of Cooling.
The centrepiece of Bolt’s article is a monthly series graph of global average temperatures from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change. On the basis of this graph Bolt claims that:
As you see, since 1998—an unusually warm year thanks to the “El Nino” pool of warmer water in the Pacific—the world’s temperature dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of cooling.
What Bolt either does not understand, or is not telling his readers, is that monthly series graphs register very short-term (i.e. monthly) fluctuations in global average temperatures. Short-term fluctuations tell us little about long-term trends, which is what the global warming debate is about. I explained this in the LP post linked to above, with reference to year to year trends which are subject to the influence of short-run trends such as movements in the El Nino/La Nina cycle (hereafter referred to as ENSO). What is true with respect to yearly fluctuations holds a fortiori for monthly fluctuations.
Continue reading ‘Rip Van Bolt’s missing months’
I could have used many harsher terms, but I was exhausted from outrage and despair after reading his latest, and couldn’t really give him my best invective.
Apparently, despite decades of study from medical and childhood health professions, Michael Savage knows better than all of them when it comes to autism. (Like so many of his fellow cultural warrior pundits, an awful lot of it boils down to WIMMIN R DOIN IT RONG (AS USUAL (COZ WIMMIN R LOOSRS)), but there’s a nasty side-dish of JUST SNAP OUT OF IT)
That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.
Basically? F*ck you and that ablist, misogynist high horse you’re riding, Savage. Continue reading ‘Michael Savage is a drongo’
Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.
Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’
If you wander into an inner-suburban bookshop at the moment, the first thing that hits you is the enormous piles of remaindered polemics about the evils of the Bush administration. The second thing that hits you is the number of green how-to guides, promising to teach you the secrets of an eco-friendly existence.
As I and others have noted repeatedly (for instance, on “food miles”), it’s much harder than people usually think to get an accurate handle on the overall impact their actions are having on the environment, and such analysis by its very nature has to be quantitative. Yes, my friends, you need numbers. These books, on my brief flick-throughs, never seem to point to any such studies, let alone explain them. Driving half an hour in a Volvo XC90 to pick up your sustainably-grown coffee isn’t likely to be a net win for the environment, but these books never grapple with this kind of trade-off.
But the prize for the most ridiculous “green guide” has to go to Gorgeously Green by one Sophie Uliano, who seems to market herself as the Green Guru for the Vogue set. Continue reading ‘Gorgeous greenwashing’
The Political Compass is a now-venerable internet quiz of people’s political leanings. But, like certain public broadcasters we know, it is vulnerable to accusations that it fails to give full voice to the rich panoply of views that are vital to any living democracy.
If, like me, you are annoyed by the lack of representation for respectable conservative opinion online, you may find the corrected Compass over the fold more to your liking.
Hint: The correct answers are (c) and sometimes (d).
Continue reading ‘Correcting the Political Compass’
Well, hasn’t it been a busy week or so for NSW Minister John Della Bosca and his wife, Federal backbencher MP Belinda Neal?
Of course, for the last few days we’ve only been hearing about her, despite Della Bosca’s documented history of multiple traffic offences leading to a revoked driving license and allegations that he was part of the alleged drunken and abusive behaviour in a Central Coast nightclub last weekend.
Last month Della Bosca’s licence was revoked for six months following a series of speeding offences, after which he reportedly swore at a newspaper photographer for taking pictures of him riding a bicycle.
Yesterday, he refused to speak to irate teachers who invaded his office to vent their fury at the Government’s decision to change the rules under which school principals hire staff. [source]
Perhaps the newspapers are a bit bored with Della Bosca’s temper, plus although people like to lampoon him he’s simply not that easy a target for anything more (such as collecting a political scalp for the editor’s wall), due to the degree of power he wields in the NSW Labor party. But his wife doesn’t have the same powerbase behind her, and besides - a woman with a filthy temper, there’s a news story with legs - cue hordes of gleefully chortling editors. Neal’s excesses have made the international newspapers now, which gives us a very pithy summary of the key points that are being latched onto for the news cycle: Continue reading ‘Power couple politics NSW style and the alleged disciplinary double standard’
Gather ’round, ye lovers of the ludicrous, ye delectators of demonologie! I have for you a tale as twisted as a fakir’s rope, as misconceived as Leda’s progeny, as labyrinthine as the guts of a gorgon!
Do not lightly look upon this miasma of misappropriation! It hath rendered dark the brightest of minds, and driven the most sanguine logicians to babbling madness!
Behold! The third nomination for the famed Award d’Agincourt, for the longest bow in journalism:
We need tough love, not bad parenting
The fair lady Elizabeth de Farrelly hath, from the insubstantial air, summoned a swarming hornets’ cloud of distract’d notions to sting and prick away all the noble faculties that give sense to reason.
The lady doth detest too much. From Peter Garrett to Wollongong council. From primary school citizenship to fuel prices. From eating too much fat to Aristotle. No segue is too tangential. No bird in the hand goes unturned. No picnic proceeds – thus! - with all its constituent sandwiches.
I know not where her arrow fell to earth. Look fast, but don’t look long, lest it pierce thy pate and dash out thy brains!
I don’t believe I’ve ever contributed to the Wikipedia’s article on Mick Keelty. But I wish I’d written this version.
(From The Age, obviously written by a reporter who has no idea about Wikipedia…)
Our security services - ASIO, ASIS, and the AFP - have expanded a great deal recently, and we essentially have to take it on trust that this is a) a good use of money, b) being used to perform the intended goal - no more and no less, and c) being done in such a way that it doesn’t impede everybody else’s rights to be left alone.
In this context, an insight into how the intelligence agencies functioned over 30 years ago is still worth thinking deeply about, and the insights from the just-released reports of the Hope Royal Commission of the mid-70’s remain disturbing today:
During a three-year inquiry, conducted largely in secret from 1974, Justice Robert Hope identified a litany of problems in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, leading him to conclude that it “may be, or may have been, penetrated by a hostile intelligence service”.
The fresh volumes of classified material released yesterday paint a damning picture of ASIO, from its formation in 1949 by Labor prime minister Ben Chifley, through to the mid-1970s.
According to Justice Hope, record-keeping at ASIO was shambolic, staff morale was low and agents spent more time digging dirt on left-wing sympathisers than looking into the greater threat posed by Soviet bloc spies operating in Australia.
“ASIO could not be taken seriously as an efficient organisation, still less an effective security organisation,” he wrote.
Continue reading ‘Hope it’s not like this any more…’
One of the more widely praised ideas coming out of the 2020 summit was “Healthbook”, something that was genuinely novel, large in scope, and with real potential to make a difference. As the interim report put it:
Create a “Healthbook” (like Facebook) for Australians to take greater ownership of their health information and electronically share it with people they trust – for example their doctor, nurse or family members. Users could control their health “friends” and their level of access, share data as desired, and ask for real time advice on health issues. By 2020, this might include sharing your own genetic data with your doctor
or family. This would put the individual squarely at the centre of the health system.
Well, lo and behold, Google Health appears in the news, which offers pretty much the kind of services - for American patients - proposed for “Healthbook”. Joshua Gans is impressed.
There are obviously big potential gains from centralized electronic medical records systems like this. As somebody who’s had the odd diagnostic test over the years for the odd ailment, this stuff gets lost - I have no idea where the back X-rays I had done once went. And, on a population-wide level, there’s obviously enormous scope for doing anonymized statistical research on this data. But would I want my medical records on Google Health, or something like it? No way in hell. Continue reading ‘Healthbook arrives, via Google’
Malcolm Turnbull may think that cutting petrol excise is bad policy. But he doesn’t mind indulging in yet more petrol-price populism:
Mr Turnbull also signalled the Coalition could move to exclude petrol from the emissions trading scheme, due to start in 2010, which puts a price on carbon emissions.
Instead of placing a carbon tax on petrol the Coalition would support stronger vehicle emissions standards.
“I am very sympathetically inclined to following the precedent in other countries … with liquid fuels used in transportation, we can get a better result by encouraging and driving greater fuel efficiencies,” Mr Turnbull said.
Continue reading ‘Turnbull joins in petrol price populism’
In my post on The Stupid Cult of Cooling and the Goyder Line debate, I commented that claims of global cooling since 1998 (or 2002, depending who you’re reading)
are, for the most part, made by the sort of people who in 1998 (or 2002) were denying the existence of the global warming which they now claim was actually happening but has ceased.
In evidence, I offer three statements by self-defined “classical liberal” newspaper columnist, publisher and host of the ABC’s Counterpoint programme, Michael Duffy.
Continue reading ‘The great denialist denial of denialism - Exhibit A’
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