Over at The Drum, Clive Hamilton begins a five part series on climate change denialism, beginning with a look at cyber-bullying.
Previously on LP: Communicating climate science.
Tag Archive for 'climate change denialism'
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has given a speech in Adelaide at the first forum designed to address the impact of climate change on Australia’s coasts. This is part of a broader programme of adaptation planning, and this particular meeting follows last year’s report on Climate Change Risks to Australia’s Coasts and the establishment of a Coasts and Climate Change Council headed by Tim Flannery.
That Council has recently released its prelimary conclusions.
Wong’s speech is significant for a number of reasons, including the fact that she rebuts the denialist criticisms of the IPCC in detail. As Gary Sauer-Thompson observes:
…development around the Australian coast assumes that sea level and storm events would function as they have in the past and our housing estates, business sites and public utilities have been designed as if the coastline and tidal levels would not change. Such assumptions are no longer valid. The Australian, of course, is not convinced.
Elsewhere: Deltoid [Brian]
Today I attended the debate between UNSW computer scientist Dr Tim Lambert (author of Deltoid blog) and Lord Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
The venue was the Hilton Hotel Grand Ballroom, and attendance was about 60% of capacity, that is roughly half the number of people who attended last time I was there, when it was packed to 120% of capacity for the launch of MySpace (remember MySpace? Neither do I…)
At any rate, I am pleased to report that the debate was indeed just that, a real debate, conducted civilly, in front of an attentive and polite crowd, and well moderated by Alan Jones.
It was neither the rabble-rousing denialist circus some feared it would be, nor an embarrassing excursion into Monckton’s many personal foibles. It was instead, a robust, articulate presentation and dissection of the factual content behind Monckton’s denialist propositions. Both speakers were modest, neither hyperbolic, and both approached the question in an open and non-dogmatic fashion. Continue reading ‘I went to a circus and a science debate broke out’
Overland editor Jeff Sparrow has a great piece in Crikey today, reflecting on the significance of Christopher Monckton’s tour of Australia. If you’re not signed up, I’d strongly urge you to take out a trial subscription to read the whole thing.
Sparrow examines how the ground for a populist upsurge of climate change denialism among “the old, the white and the angry” was well prepared by the Howard era culture wars. Continue reading ‘The cultural politics and sociology of anti-science in Tony Abbott’s Australia’
One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.
Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.
There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.
Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:
We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.
Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:
A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.
Tony Abbott appears to have taken that gospel saying about being “cunning as a serpent” to heart, if not the bit about being “gentle as a dove”. The problem with the media cycle these days for the political obfuscator is that it’s harder to say one thing to one audience and one to another – always one of the great political standbys. You can, however, get away with it, given that few people are paying attention to anything but the soundbites targeted at them – you know, the spin Abbott and co are always accusing Kevin Rudd of.
In comments on another thread, Sir Henry Casingbroke has a great summation of the new Liberal leader’s appearance on Lateline tonight, and his political tactics. The ‘base’ he appears to be aiming at is the ‘battlers’ – it’s a defensive strategy to stop further Labor gains in outer suburban and regional seats. How that will be squared with the resurrection rebadging of WorkChoices remains to be seen.
But there’s another aspect to Abbott’s strategy – one I alluded to in my Overland post (also discussed here). Ironically, opposing market solutions (albeit with something completely illusory) might, in Abbott’s mind, work wonders for the parties of the right. The denialist dog whistling and the claims that ‘warming has stopped’ are just the ideological icing on the cake:
So business as usual is popular, with the odd twist that it’s now the political right who oppose market solutions. But Tony Abbott may be onto something; he’s playing to the politics of a vague desire that ‘something be done’. Install a solar panel, and forget about it – the state will sort it out. It won’t happen, but it has an appeal above and beyond market solutions which by necessity create winners and losers, and precisely the uncertainty and fear that most would rather wish away.
The federal Liberals are sounding and thinking a lot more like the Nats than a week ago…
It’s probably time to take stock again of the Liberal leadership spill shenanigans.
John Howard has obviously been having a word in a few journos’ ears. Tony Wright penned this piece for The Age yesterday, portraying the Ghost of Wollstonecraft as pulling the strings. It seems Little Johnny couldn’t stand Nick Minchin and the Minchkins getting all the credit for tearing Turnbull down.
I think Hockey’s pilgrimage to Howard on Saturday was staged to suggest that he’s the true heir to the throne, and to imply that Turnbull was an unfortunate interloper. None of those ‘progressive’ hymns in Howard’s broad church! Had they wanted to meet covertly, it wouldn’t have been too hard.
Alex White wrote yesterday on Turnbull’s Cameronisation. If it’s all about following scripts, the Tories’ recent one wouldn’t be a bad one to follow. After all, turning away from the right and talking up green issues has contributed to reviving the UK Conservatives’ electoral chances.
Hockey is obviously keeping his powder dry, so that he can claim he is a unity candidate by not bringing on a spill. That’s the sort of dissimulation for which Howard is famous, but it’s unlikely he’ll be able to bring it off. It’s his second time around as a cuddly frontman for nasty things (think WorkChoices), and he made a hash of it the first time. (See also Peter Martin on his record.) All the talk of some sort of cunning Keating like strategy against the Rudd government’s CPRS forgets that Keating was a superb politician. Hockey is not.
He simply isn’t up to the task, and he probably knows it. He won’t have a lot of credibility as a puppet leader papering over the cracks of a deeply divided party, and it would be risible to think that the events of the last week won’t come back to haunt the Liberals. All talk of Sunrise aside, Rudd’s political machine will eat him for breakfast.
Whether the Liberals would be able to agree on some sort of alternative if the CPRS bills are delayed til February is moot. Certainly all their divisions over climate change will not magically disappear even if Malcolm is whisked off the scene.
It’s not over til it’s over, of course, but speculation has increasingly turned to Turnbull leaving the party and/or parliament. Whatever he decides to do, the ‘dead man walking’ of the press gallery commentary circa early last week (and haven’t some changed their tune?) will come out of all this looking pretty good in many people’s eyes.
Possum’s extremely interesting analysis of the Nielsen poll demonstrates that Turnbull has been appealling to precisely the voters that the Liberals need to be in with any chance of winning the next election – ones currently inclined to vote Labor. I’d have thought that was a lot more meaningful for a serious political party than some sort of ‘protect the furniture and play to the base’ strategy. There’s lots more in Possum’s post which should provide a reality check in terms of how all this has played in the public’s eyes. Liberal MPs and Senators might be well advised to consider that.
Stay tuned for further updates, and you can follow the thing on Twitter as well.
Elsewhere: Some interesting personal reflections on Malcolm Turnbull from Christopher Joye.
Update: New post on firming speculation that Turnbull intends to lead a new party should he lose tomorrow.
[Via Labor Outsider in comments] The Australian is reporting that an analysis of Newspoll data collected in September suggests that 63% of urban Coalition voters want the government’s CPRS passed, with only 28% against, and that the Liberals could lose 20 metropolitan seats.
I’d like to see what folks like Possum make of the claims about potential vote switching, and of the changed context from when the poll was taken, but this should nevertheless certainly concentrate Liberal minds as they contemplate whether or not to dump Malcolm Turnbull, and also put all the guff this week about the “Liberal base” in perspective. If there’s any truth to that, and it wasn’t *just* a campaign orchestrated by the likes of Bolta and the Parrot, the Liberal party membership is very seriously out of touch with an awful lot of Liberal voters.
Could this be the game changer Turnbull has been waiting for?
Update: SBS news is reporting that Malcolm Turnbull, at his Sydney press conference this morning, has asserted he has Joe Hockey’s support.
Elsewhere: Ken Parish on constitutional issues and the prospects of a double dissolution, and Trevor Cook asks if the Liberal Party can survive.
Update: Turnbull’s latest press conference via SBS News. He’s confident he will remain leader, and urges passage of the CPRS.
Update: Turnbull surrogate Senator Gary Humphreys says that Liberal internal polling replicates the newspoll story; a wipeout if they go all climate change denially.
Update: New post on the latest thrills and spills.
Having talked to a few friends over the last few days who aren’t political junkies (but are more taken with politics than perhaps the average voter), I’m not at all convinced that the Liberal leadership shenanigans are of anywhere near the same interest to most folks as they are to those of us who’ve been as transfixed as we become during election campaigns. I’ve already commented that there’s a strange forgetting (or perhaps a return to the default truth) among political journalists that politics – and the nation which will be confronting climate change – exists outside a few rooms in Canberra.
Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.
So what of the role of the media in all this?
Continue reading ‘The media, social media and the Liberal thrills and spills’
In the wake of today’s extraordinary events in the Coalition party room, Malcolm Turnbull could put to good use the very qualities he’s usually been panned by his right wing colleagues and the commentariat for having – displaying some courage by making an impetuous gamble from a risky position. The fact that neither Wilson Tuckey nor Kevin Andrews were able to orchestrate a spill during or after the protracted on again, off again meeting is telling. If they actually had the numbers to roll Turnbull, it would have been on. Because the split inside the Liberal party is so entrenched, it’s highly likely that Turnbull has about the same base level of support as he had when elected. In other words, whatever Peter Van Onselen and the commentariat may think, Turnbull has the numbers. That’s been proved today.
The denialists want a couple of extra days to try to turn the numbers around. Nick Minchin’s concession in the days leading up to the showdown that the CPRS should be decoupled from the leadership question is not an act of loyalty to Turnbull, but a sign that he knows that while he is able to muster a fair number of crazy Senators to support his die in the ditch attitude, he cannot muster a majority of Liberals to overthrow his leader. Let’s not forget that the Nats, who are firmly in the denialist camp, have no vote for the Liberal leader. Hence also all the veiled threats about leaving the Coalition – it’s the only way they can exercise influence over the Liberal leadership.
Turnbull should follow through on what his numbers folks were up to before the meeting – “put the stick about”, in Francis Urquhart’s memorable phrase, and focus attentions on the long delayed reshuffle. Casting Abbott and Robb overboard would be a plus, and any spill threat could be turned around to include Minchin’s gig as Senate Leader.
There is no future for the Liberal party in playing to a portion of its base which holds antideluvian attitudes on almost every issue in the book. They will not vote Labor in a pink fit, anyway. He has to reach out to the centre, and the best way to do so would be to take on the dinosaurs in his own party and establish firm control.
He might also wish to find a way to stop all the dissenters’ views being immediately recycled in The Australian. It’s quite possible for a leader who wins narrowly, but who can’t be overthrown (and the fact that Andrews is seen as a plausible candidate shows just how risible the right wing putsch is) to start acting like a leader, and become one.
Then, and only then, Kevin Rudd might have a fight on his hands.
Interesting times.
Update: George Brandis on Lateline added further confirmation to the vapid nature of most of the leadership spill talk, by mentioning that Tony Abbott had endorsed Turnbull’s leadership at the meeting, and – significantly – that Turnbull had called for people to indicate their desire for a spill at the end, and no one had. We also know that Liberal party rules don’t mean that a letter from two backbenchers seeking a meeting on the leadership necessarily has any consequences. Brandis also indicated that Turnbull had a large majority of Liberals behind him. As I pointed out, the Nats don’t get a vote on the leadership.
And as Annabel Crabb suggested, the Kevin Andrews candidacy hasn’t exactly sparked massive enthusiasm. Even Bolta’s ardour appears to have cooled as the night’s worn on. Van Onselen was back in default mode of “Liberal sources say, high level discussions behind the scenes…” – which is pretty much what he and his mates have been writing all year. If Turnbull wants to give the commentariat a few more thrills and spills, I suspect they’ll only come from a reshuffle.
Update: Bernard Keane:
Continue reading ‘Crash through or crash? What Turnbull should do now…’
You really have to feel a bit sorry for Malcolm Turnbull. Any chance he had of representing himself as leading a party enlightened on the policy response to climate change is gone completely, no matter what happens in tomorrow’s party room debate on the amendments negotiated between Ian Macfarlane and Penny Wong.
Tonight’s Lateline had the New South Wales National Senator, John Williams, orating about “global control” and declaiming “carbon is not a pollutant”. Then we saw Kevin Andrews, of all people, in effect refusing to rule out a leadership bid. Very hard to say which is more insane…
Earlier on LP: Previous post and discussion on the politics of the Liberals’ divisions over the CPRS.
Update: D-Day developments covered here.
Shock! Horror! Political journosphere shocked by the ALP playing politics!
Ben Eltham has a wrap up of the week in politics at New Matilda. It’s certainly fair to say that it certainly didn’t go all the Coalition’s way. What surprises me about the commentary we’ve seen in the lead up to and after the resumption of Parliament is some sort of default assumption that Tony Abbott would release his climate change policy, and happily elope with the voters, and that’s the last we’d hear of politics in an election year. Dennis Shanahan is, as always, indicative:
There’s some sort of bizarre alternate reality here, where the Opposition is constantly at the centre of events, and any sort of response which doesn’t play to the ‘media narrative’ from the Government is somehow electoral poison.
It’s just nuts. I suspect, in part, it derives from a belief that if the Liberals could unite behind one leader, all would be plain sailing from there on in. In fact, as one week of Barnaby-isms demonstrates, even without leadership speculation, they’re still shambolic. I think there’s still some sort of weird assumption that the Liberals are the natural party of government, and that the electorate are finally waking up to the mistake made in 2007; hence Labor is represented as being panic stricken after a single poll where their two party preferred vote is 52-48. (John Howard’s first term government, by contrast, spent a large part of the time behind in the polls.)
So we also get a bizarre perception that Labor is some sort of immovable object, locked in behind last year’s politics, and unable to shape the political landscape. This is reinforced by constant generalisation on the basis of anecdote – “voters are concerned by debt and deficit”, “Rudd is untrustworthy”, “climate change skepticism is on the increase”, very little of which has much support in any relevant polling. And the descent of Rudd’s own approval rating from its stellar heights is seen as an avatar of doom, without any particular attempt to correlate it with the party vote.
All very odd.
Like I said early in the week, watch the political narrative change.