As you can see from the sidebar, my comments boxes have been extensively spammed, I assume by some sort of spambot. This could really be a threat to blogging – is anyone aware of countermeasures?
Meanwhile, please post lots of comments on different topics, to push this lowlife off my page and save me the trouble of deleting him manually.
Get into the Western Plains Zoo. We turned up yesterday afternoon, but admissions had already stopped for the day. There was a big storm overnight, and the zoo was closed for repairs today. So we drove back to Brisbane, seeing most of the northern catchments of the Murray-Darling Basin in the aftermath of excellent and widespread rain. My back of the envelope estimate suggested that several thousand GL of water had fallen in a single day, but I’m glad to be corrected on this.
I also missed the Senate Committee on Telstra which, by a surprising coincidence, held its hearings in Dubbo yesterday. I’m appearing tomorrow in Nambour, a little way north of Brisbane.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Bjorn Lomborg’s favorite argument against Kyoto is that the money it would cost would be better spent helping poor countries. This is in keeping with his pose as a leftist greenie, reluctantly convinced of the truth of the arguments of people like Julian Simon.
So it would not be surprising to find Lomborg working for a Danish government that opposed Kyoto and spent more on foreign aid. The Rasmussen govt, for which Lomborg works, does indeed oppose Kyoto. But it has also repeatedly cut foreign aid.
Lomborg is a hypocrite and a fraud. It’s as simple as that
Update Various commentators have reacted on the apparent assumption that Lomborg is a civil servant, expressing his private views in his spare time. In fact, the Danish government created an Environmental Assessment Institute with a position as director specifically for Lomborg, whose only qualifications for such a post are the political views expressed in The Sceptical Environmentalist (he has never published a refereed article on any environmental issue). Given the frequency with which he pops up around the world, I assume that his tour to Australia is being carried out as part of his official duties.
Further update 5/10 Stentor Danielson has a good discussion of the issues raised by Lomborg’s actions, and concludes, that Lomborg doesn’t care too much about the foreign aid cuts because
really thinks that reducing spending on global warming is a good thing in and of itself (only a suspicion because I haven’t read his manifesto, The Skeptical Environmentalist)
I have read it, and I agree.
John Quiggin 