It is I think, comparatively rare for a senior political figure to describe equally senior members of their own party as “fruit loops” and “f…wits”, going on to observe that “They don’t know how crazy they look, because crazy people never do”.
But that was exactly the reaction to last Monday’s Four Corner’s program in which Liberal Party Senate Leader Nick Minchin and others went on camera to spout delusionist conspiracy theories of the type Kevin Rudd had pre-emptively denounced only two days previously (i guess he had an idea what was going to be on Four Corners). Minchin described the scientific consensus view that human activity is driving climate change as the result of a communist plot, saying
For the extreme Left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of deindustrialise the Western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the Left, and … they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.
This is, of course, standard stuff on the political right – I had a string of people pointing me to the latest silly talking point in which a British unfair dismissal case was supposed to prove that global warming is a religion – but it was a big mistake to say it on Four Corners.
The real problem though is that Nick Minchin is not, in the ordinary sense of the term, a fruit loop or f…wit. Rather, he is a sharp and effective political operator, who doesn’t worry much about ideas and therefore takes his beliefs from the environment in which he moves. In the current state of the right that means his ideas on climate change, like those of most of the people with whom he mixes, are deeply delusional. So thoroughly embedded are delusionist assumptions and information sources on the right that, within the given cultural milieu, any psychologically normal person must necessarily, in exactly the same way as any psychologically normal member of an isolated tribal culture would accept the standard myths of that culture. The delusionist message is propounded by a parallel-universe of “scientists” (a handful of whom have relevant scientific qualifications), think tanks and bloggers, and continually reinforced by the distribution of talking points like the unfair dismissal case mentioned above.
This is bad enough as applied to climate change, which is one of the big problems facing the world. But the problem goes far beyond this, extending, for example to economic policy issues. It is unsurprising that advocates of market liberalism would like to downplay the implications of the global financial crisis for the theoretical foundations of their position such as the efficient markets hypothesis, and it ought to be possible to make a case that the current crisis does not provide sufficient evidence to abandon the EMH. But, thanks to the rightwing talking points machine, no one much feels the need to make such a case. Instead we get absurd claims that the near-collapse of global capitalism was brought about by the Community Reinvestment Act, a minor piece of 1970s legislation aimed at ensuring fair access to bank loans for credit-worthy borrowers in poor neighborhoods. This claim, silly on its face, has been comprehensively refuted, but people I would otherwise regard as sensible continue to put it forward.
And of course, the talking points machine was seen in full force before and during the Iraq war. The lionization of someone like Arthur Chrenkoff, who argued throughout 2003, 2004 and 2005 that the view of events in Iraq presented by the mainstream media was excessively gloomy and pessimistic (!) and presented a “Good News from Iraq” to explain how well things were going, was a typical instance. Chrenkoff ended up working for Liberal Senator Brett Mason, who is, unsurprisingly a prominent climate delusionist.
The fact is that the political right, at least in the US and among those sections of Australian opinion that take their lead from the US, has become utterly unhinged from reality, to the point where anyone who relies on rightwing sources for information is bound to be deluded. Even where individual pieces of evidence may be factually correct, they are selected to support delusional claims such as those cited above, with the often overwhelming evidence to the contrary being disregarded.
This raises an interesting question for those of my readers inclined to conservative or libertarian views but disinclined to joining the fruit loops. How should such a person form their views on current issues. My answer is that the only option is to ignore entirely everything written on “their” side of the debate and confine attention to factual evidence presented by reputable official and scientific sources and to critical analysis of the arguments of the “left:. Perhaps if enough people did this, they would be able to form the nucleus of a body of thought which would reclaim the ground once occupied by sane conservatives. But, at present, there is no sign of this happening.
John Quiggin 
@ChrisB
If we thought we were taken back to the 1950s with JH, these two would take us back to teh dark ages.
Now, not only do I have to check for Reds under the bed, but I have to check for Greens as well. Next it will be a Yellow peril?
That will be a full spectrum conspiratorial threat.
Freelander, this is a complete and trivial derail, but, to finish it, do you really think the Argentine aggression, totally unprovoked, againt the wishes of the island residents, should have been simply accepted? If you’re looking for a just war, you’d have to say the British had as good a one as you could get. Everyone complains that we didn’t intervene in East Timor, or West Papua, but the brits defending their own citizens is not OK?
Oh, and excuse me but the British left their empire in a reasonably dignified way through the second half of the century, better than any other post-colonial power I can think of. To suggest that they defended the Falklands simply as a jingoistic nationalist response is a novel interpretation to me.
It may well be novel to you but it is at worst, a plausible piece of analysis. At great expense, it worked brilliantly. At a fraction of the financial and human cost, the islanders could have been evacuated to somewhere far nicer.
None of this is to deny that the same dynamic was going on in Argentina of course.
And in Gibraltar and many places where previous empires are holding on to land that they ought to abandon. Thatcher actually thought she could hold on to Hong Kong.
I was told, some years ago, that by a Hong Kong Chinese that they have a word that they used for the British colonialists. The translation is “Filth”.
And of course the Argintinian dictators did the whole thing for the same sorts of reasons, and because they probably expected more sensible behaviour from the Iron Lady.
@jquiggin
No arguments here. I’m not sure how many books are directly affected by parallel book importation rules. Presumably there are some big name Australian authors with a small international profile, for whom substantial price discrimination might be worthwhile. But the internet and single book orders presumably limits this to an increasing extent. I think the ‘leftist’ response was also (and perhaps more) disproportionate to the issue (death of Australian writing, etc.). If the public is sometimes fixated on ‘fourth order’ issues, the opponents of ‘trivial reforms’ deserve their share of blame.
“They are stuck on the policy agenda of the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on symbolic trivia and with nothing to offer in response to the spectacular failure of the deregulated (or to be more precise, weakly controlled but publicly guaranteed) financial system that was a central element of that agenda.”
I think I prefer your more precise definition. I agree that if there are public guarantees, the case for extensive financial regulation becomes much stronger. (If I recall, that was your argument in Great Expectations.) Without having any expertise in the area, there would seem to be some areas where governments could remove implicit or explicit public guarantees to deal with excessive risk taking and ‘looting’. But I could be wrong.
Hi Tony – your comment here:
“Thats right it has to do with the scum that places the life of trees over and above that of humans. Please place fuel no closer than 3 metres from your house so that it burns better and no backburning please as I prefer the smell of burnt flesh.”
Even dumber than I thought. I was talking about the people who died in the Melbourne HEATWAVE which was before the bushfires and had nothing to do with burning off or fires – these people died in a HEATWAVE.
The vicious heat you say is normal.
John, some might argue that the departure of Howard & Costello has created a vacuum within the neo-conservative side of politics and what we are witnessing are the last remnants living in a fool’s paradise.
Rudy you said “As the fires ravage, and the blood and corpses mount, Even dumber than I thought, I didn’t know you spell HEATWAVE “f-i-r-e-s ravage”….next you will be telling us some fraud like ‘the globe’ is getting warmer’ is spelt ‘climate change’.
Tony, I clearly referred to people dying in the heatwave.
So please answer the question. The record breaking heatwave that killed hundreds of people in Melbourne was normal weather in your opinion……do please answer the question….
@rudy
Rudy – I wouldnt bother. Tony G will only duck and weave. He wouldnt notice the rise in temperature in a Sauna.
Minchin’s reaction – and that of the sizeable groups who refuse to accept global warming – may be less crazy (in the sense of abnormally weird) than it seems. It may be that Minchin has grasped what Rudd and many others have not – that global warming profoundly challenges so much of our current ways of thought that to accept it as fact (and the basic science is not that hard – roughly senior high school) is to perforce to have to go on to accept major changes in lots of areas. An example is that holding CO2 and the other greenhouse gases to acceptable levels means managing at least decades ahead (because that’s the lag time for ocean take-up or release, glacier stabilisation and much else), and managing within limits globally – with all that means in terms of acceptable distribution of many forms of consumption within a limit. I would put Des Moore of the Institute for Public Affairs in the same camp.
There is a parallel with Darwin and natural selection here – that is not accepted by 50 per cent of the US population and substantial numbers in the UK, despite a century of education, evidence and even practical application in areas like medicine. The problem is, of course, that not believing in natural selection won’t have major consequences – but if you can’t swallow the gnat of the science, the camel of response is always going to be much too big. In one sense, Rudd is less sensible- he accepts the science (although I doubt he has tried to seriously understand it), but balks at effective action.
Tony G said “Thats right it has to do with the scum that places the life of trees over and above that of humans. Please place fuel no closer than 3 metres from your house so that it burns better and no backburning please as I prefer the smell of burnt flesh.”
What a comtemptible thing to say. Most of Kinglake bush had been burnt in fuel reduction burns a few months before the fire – I know. I was up there a fortnight before the fires visiting friends. Most of the rest of Kinglake is open fields and crop land – berry fruits and orchards. Fires still came over it.
I don’t know if you’ve been up there since the fire. There are lone trees in the middle of paddocks where the top had been blasted but the bottom of the tree was untouched. It was a firestorm fueled by high winds, high temperatures and prolonged drought. Blaming the greenies for it, apart from being a vile slur, is yet another example of the Right’s complete separation from reality.
Since when is science about consensus ?
With the whole debate on AGW I am often reminded that for the average punter there is very little to choose between morally ‘bad’ yet practical wars and morally ‘good’ yet impractical ones. Welcome to Afghanistan for the ‘long haul’ folks, ‘mission accomplished’ having faded from thinking persons’ vocabulary, naturally. It’s a bit like the Republican debate. Every thinking person should naturally be in favour of such enlightenment until the practical mechanics of electing the new President is trotted out, not to mention the inevitable Bill of Wrongs, strings attached. Minchin like so many smells a rat, but cannot articulate exactly where the smell is coming from. That’s because like so many of his ilk he cannot articulate a market green alternative. To do that requires a radical rethink of the inherited science of muddling through and rigorous analysis of just how various prices we observe today have resulted. They are simply the result of a particular constituted marketplace and a failing one at that given emerging realities. The one thing Minchin does know is that an ETS is just more of the same old same old and in that he has an increasing number of allies in unaccustomed places. Friends of the Earth and the Greens must be troubled with the new credit creation, one that has failed miserably so far where it has been attempted and now can be decimated cost wise by simple currency movements as our own Treasury point out. As if that’s not troubling enough, the high priest of AGW Al Gore comes out and admits CO2 is now scientifically only responsible for 40% of warming. Even more credit creation and derivatives will be needed to fuel the trading tables of the global financial sector it seems, but to be a skeptic about that is clearly delusional. Apparently the efficient public sector hypothesis will take care of it all, just as soon as they can all agree on what exactly it is they’re going to take care of.
I didn’t see the Four Corners program, so the following refers to Professor Quiggins comments rather than Minchin’s.
Saying that the fall of communism sent the Left on a quest for another anti-capitalist cause is not the same thing as saying there is a “communist plot”.
A silly talking point (if it was) proves nothing, I’ll bet that for every one given by a skeptic I could find ten given by a warmist.
Sharp and effective political operator’s who have no interest in the truth of their ideas tend to run with a majority pack rather than with a beleaguered minority.
Beliefs are often derived from tribal myths (e.g. religious beliefs) but skepticism of the dangerous anthropogenic climate change orthodoxy is less likely to be derived this way than just about any belief I can think of – much less likely than the orthodoxy is.
Tribal beliefs require proximate groupthink, e.g. within a church, university, or political party. Where is the skeptics’ church, university or party? Climate skeptics are conservatives, libertarians, Protestants, Catholics, atheists, ex-Greens, humanitarians, and etcetera(mostly they are just people of common sense); but every one of those “tribes” have warmists too. Any skeptics in the academic Left tribe?
Being a climate skeptic in today’s culture requires confidence in ones independent judgment. Being an anthropogenic warming activist doesn’t, all it requires is conformity with the most publicized myth of our day: that urgent and costly government action is required to curb carbon “pollution” to avert a catastrophe.
“I was told, some years ago, that by a Hong Kong Chinese that they have a word that they used for the British colonialists. The translation is “Filth”.”
No translation is required.
It’s an acronym.
“Failed in London? Try Hong Kong.”
“Being a climate skeptic in today’s culture requires confidence in ones independent judgment. ”
As does being a supporter of NAMBLA.
=
Being a “tobacco causes lung cancer” sceptic – haaackk, cough, cough – in today’s culture requires confidence in ones (sic) independent judgement.
Being a “CFCs affect the ozone layer” sceptic – ow, it burns! It burns! – in today’s culture requires confidence in ones (sic) independent judgement.
Being a “Sulphur dioxide doesn’t cause Acid Rain” sceptic – funny lookin’ forrests – in today’s culture requires confidence in ones (sic) independent judgement.
Independent judgement, as someone puts is, is not enough. There needs to be the independent analysis of the facts and theories first, upon which to base your independent judgement.
Okay Ian and Donald, having confidence in his independent judgement (and analysis of the facts) doesn’t guarantee the skeptic is right, but it does guarantee that he’s not a delusional follower of a tribal myth – which was my point.
What gives him the right to be skeptical is that the anthropogenic warmists’ arguments don’t add up logically into a sensible case. And that when challenged they demonize, try to shut down debate, and mount ever more hysterical scare campaigns.
@Donald Oats
Im the ultimate skeptic Donald! Its the stork that really delivers babies!
Pr Q says:
This is obviously true for about the past 15 years, for the US New Right. The post-Gingrich Southern-based Right has opted for politics over policy in power, which has left its world view at the mercy of hacks, cranks & crooks on its side of politics.
Yet AUS’s institutional (as opposed to intellectual) Right’s policy performance is much superior to its US counterpart. Very much so as far as deeds rather than words, but even in words as well.
I put this down to the inherent good sense of AUS’s mainstream voters, who are in general more reality-grounded than comparable polities. We will not let our politicians get away with even minor bits of nonsense for too long. Americans get carried away.
Under Howard’s reign the AUS political Right never succumbed to the US Right’s general delusionism. Nothing about Howard’s ministry was “unhinged from reality”, including and perhaps especially, the more objectionable aspects.
This includes foot-dragging on ETS, AWB, Pacific Solution, Iraq-attack and Work Choices. All these policies, with the notable except of WC, were plausibly justifiable under the AUS’s national interest, or at least popular enough with the mainstream polity, who are no fools in this country. The L/NP only payed a political price for WC and even this was well in advance.
And of course there were many laudable aspects of Howard’s ministry that were far more in-hinged with reality than the AUS Left, so far as sensible policy and mainstream politics were concerned. ETimor, counter-terrorism, border protection, the Intervention, national civic-culturalism, health centralism, the GST, gun control, vastly improved immigration regulation, reasonable fiscal/financial complementarity.
Since Howard has left the L/NP have made further policy progress. Nelson ditched WC and Turnbull is making a fairly good pass at embracing ETS.
Its true that Minchin et al are global warming delusionists. They are reflecting their more powerful constituents interests. The AUS mineral sector is bigger in relation to total GDP than counterparts in the US or UK.
Of course most of AUS’s intellectual Right (press, think tanks, blogs) are genuinely “fruit loopy” or at least brazenly rejecting scientific discourse. They are after all paid to traffic in ideas and appear to believe the nonsense they trot out on AGW, Iraq and DDT. But they are only responding to their more vocal customers views.
If they reject an ETS they will pay a penalty for oiling the sqeaky wheel at the next election. But that has yet to go through the formality of happening.
My general conclusion is that AUS’s institutional Right is not so much “fruit loopy” as philistine. They are anti-intellectual because they have a (sometimes well-founded) suspicion of egg-heads in politics. They are not interested in ideas that appear to comfort their opponents or policies which they dont think will make much of a difference except to their pocketbooks.
Basically AUS’s Right comes unstuck when it plays to its players rather than the Outer, or even the members grandstand. This gets even worse when it starts to follow games played away from home, eg the US.
The answer to that is obviously never, but that is also irrelevant to the policy debate. That proper place for the ideas in science to be debated is through peer-reviewed journals by scientist using the scientific method.
Whilst science shouldn’t rely on consensus, policy should. If the best science to date identifies a large and possibly catastrophic risk then the only defensible position is to look to mitigate it. Why run an experiment that has potentially catastrophic results if you don’t need to. This would be analogous to continuing to use a bridge that the majority of qualified civil engineers deemed to be unsafe. If you continued to allow it to be used on the basis that a couple of engineers who aren’t willing to publish their analysis say it is safe and too expensive to fix or replace.
GC @ 15 (2) said;
“Most of Kinglake bush had been burnt in fuel reduction burns a few months before the fire – I know. I was up there a fortnight before the fires visiting friends”
GC you are either a liar (AGW fraudster) or blind, as this photo of The burnt out township of Kinglake clearly shows burnt out houses in amongst what is left of the fuel.
A “contemptible thing” is the scum that places the life of trees over and above that of humans.
Science is completely about consensus, and I’m surprised that people don’t understand that. A scientific result isn’t of consequence until it is accepted (and perhaps even not until it is replicated) by peers.
Scientific research in the top drawer, or in a magazine article or on a blog, is of little consequence. Not until it is published does it become a true contribution to science. It is through publishing, that results pass the initial litmus test of peer review, and then the wider and more rigorous process of having the ideas survive and propagate (or languish) under the scrutiny of the wider scientific community.
Look at the past debates about whether light is a particle or a wave for example. Or the current debate about string theory.
Science is a discussion similar to most other arguments/discussions. But where it is dissimilar, is that the primary currency of argument is observation, empirical evidence and rationality, not polemic and emotional trickery.
“Okay Ian and Donald, having confidence in his independent judgement (and analysis of the facts) doesn’t guarantee the skeptic is right, but it does guarantee that he’s not a delusional follower of a tribal myth – which was my point.
What gives him the right to be skeptical is that the anthropogenic warmists’ arguments don’t add up logically into a sensible case. And that when challenged they demonize, try to shut down debate, and mount ever more hysterical scare campaigns.”
Or he’s simply a delusional follower of a different tribal myth.
As for “ever more hysterical scare campaigns” how do you feel about Monckton’s claim that Copenhagen will usher in a global socialist dictatorship?
@Michael
Quite right … the wiki discussion is germane.
Monckton didn’t “claim that Copenhagen will usher in a global socialist dictatorship”, that’s one of those “silly talking points Q?
Sure – replication is important, so consensus matters in that respect. I just meant that if someone publishes new research that establishes a new hypothesis, then because it is not in sync with a prior consensus is no reason to immediately discount it. Of course most of the sceptics don’t seem to be inclined to publish in relevant journals.
Whoops. Monckton didn’t “claim that Copenhagen will usher in a global socialist dictatorship” Ian, that’s one of those “silly talking points” Quiggin refers to, he claimed that the (now shelved) Copenhagen treaty would sign away part of our sovereignity to an unelected world body, which it would.
Michael @ 25 (2) said;
“This would be analogous to continuing to use a bridge that the majority of qualified civil engineers deemed to be unsafe”
No it would be analogous to continuing to use a bridge that the majority of qualified in “any” science or science of economics or science of politics…etc…etc…deemed to be unsafe.
Science is about experiments that predict the outcome of a future observation. This is the “testing” part of science.
Calculating the tensile strength of a material and the stress distribution in the body is well understood. Experiments can be conducted to predict the outcome of a future observation (i.e at what load the bridge would fail). Experiments in stress mechanics are repeated and verified independently all over the world every day.
Climate science or AGW fraud cannot be tested and hence it is not scientific. There are no climate science experiments that predict the outcome of a future observation. There are no Climate science experiments that are repeatable in the laboratory and hence that prove the theory. There are not 2 containers with 1million parts of atmosphere, one with 313ppm of carbon and the other with 383ppm of carbon, demonstrating the change in the “net irradiance”. Until climate science or AGW fraud produce an experiment DEMONSTSRATING the change in the “net irradiance” STFU.
@John Dawson
To quote you first, John:
It isn’t a question of having a right to be sceptical or not. Scientific scepticism is a principle in which various scientists assess the work of others, especially results that would be advancements if true, and in which scientists drill down through the layers of earlier research, looking at the underpinnings with newer techniques and more technologically advanced instruments.
Scepticism in the more popular sense is not scientific scepticism, as it does not necessarily entail any intent or actual activity to examine the claim more closely. Often this sort of scepticism is lacking in substance precisely because it isn’t about knowing, it is about any of a number of other things – which I’ll leave unspecified.
I accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming within the scientifically determined limitations – not the media version, that’s for sure – and that is really a more nuanced theory subsumed to some degree by more the more general theories governing climate change prior to humanities experiment with industrialisation. A number of things might blunt AGW somewhat, if they prove to be well supported by evidence, and to survive scientific examination of the scientifically sceptical kind – not media or political scepticism.
So, as someone who accepts AGW, allow me to demonstrate scepticism. I’m sceptical of the level of accuracy – I’ll explain it in this context shortly – claimed for the timing of atmospheric CO2 changes relative to temperature changes in the time series from ice cores in general. It isn’t that I think the current measurements are wrong as such; it is to do with the degree of smoothing which necessarily occurs due to the firnification process and the entrapment of the contempory air. I think that the errors which naturally occur in determining approximately annual cylinders in the cores is probably larger than currently thought. However, I have no experience of doing this sort of lab work, and so my scepticism may be merely a reflection of my ignorance. In other words, I am quite prepared for the possibility of future work to actually strengthen the claims of specific accuracy in various scientific papers, or to demonstrate that greater uncertainty, than currently recognised, exists for some ice core data in some circumstances. A complete overturning of all ice core annual counts, air bubble analysis, etc is, on the other hand, something I would be extremely sceptical about, for the simple reason that there are a number of independent markers which allow scientists to resychronise counts and the like at various parts of the timeline. I’m only concerned about a limited increase in uncertainty concerning data error, not unbounded uncertainty!
My specific example of scientific scepticism – by a non-practitioner of the particular science – is about one aspect of one type of data for a limited number of cases. I’m open to corroboration or refutation, or a get more data and see, set of possibilities. That’s scientific advancement.
Your scepticism John Dawson, seems to be about overturning an entire theory in one fell swoop. You will need to provide some significant evidence to challenge AGW, and the evidence must be limited to the relevant circumstances for which AGW theory applies.
Yet bridges still fail! “In 2001 a stress inspection was done and Minnesota Department of Transportation stated that the bridge “should not have any problems with fatigue cracking in the foreseeable future.””
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Highway_bridge_in_Minneapolis,_Minnesota,_collapses
lol at how unhinged Tony G sounds.
“Climate science or AGW fraud cannot be tested and hence it is not scientific. There are no climate science experiments that predict the outcome of a future observation.”
Climate science is tested all the time – refer realclimate.org
The second sentence doesn’t make a lot of grammatical sense. However, climate science uses observation and experiments, and then makes future predictions, all the time – refer IPCC reports
Denialists ultimate resource is that they have access to their own ‘facts’, but so do members of of NAMBLA.
Minchin and Co wore their coal miners helmets for all to see. Turnbull has not embraced global warming he is looking after the special interest groups and founders of the liberal / National party. The argument is not about mitigating global warming but whom shall wear the costs consumers/householders or big business.
JQ Repost from duplicate thread
Could not agree more. The delusional line continues to receive substantial support from the commentariate who festoon the pages of the major papers and hence nullify the occasional minor report providing some sensible facts with which to do some serious thinking.
One observation; common to the delusional mythology spouted by the likes of Barnaby, agriculture is not excluded from Carbon schemes (Solar credits, carbon sequestration permits etc), it is just not fully included and some of the accounting for a lot of these natural processes remains diffcult to quantify but it will be. Which also goes to show how hideously difficult the sell of the ETS, no matter what form, will be when it finally gets up, it is devilshly complex and difficult to work through. I have spent nearly three days working through layers of bureaucratic complexity to register for and properly have registered our small properties contribution to carbon reduction and sequestration programs. Explaining that process and providing easy access to many people who do not even understand the basic physics of how carbon dioxide is produced in the first place will be a very very hard task.
Barnaby and the lunatic right continue to resist any attempt at making an energy efficient world and new ways of living and doing business, which qualifies them for the conservative tag but they do so based on a delusional paradigm and it would appear cretinist cupidity.
Finally, cheers to Mike Carlton’s piece on Lord Monckton on Saturday in the SMH and please Rupert bring on those changes to internet delivery of news and information. The sooner the mainstream media is locked up behind a paywall where few will read their mad meanderings the better. Rupert bring on the paywall please!!
JQ a rethink on Minchin’s line, with reflection I think he is engaged in a little bit of conservative ‘dog whistling’ , he is far too astute to believe such rubbish but paradoxically is also sufficiently intelllectually vacuous to probably not have any strong views about anything of any import but his own future, which would suggest as some already have done that is a core matter of political philosophy and there is therefore a push on to develop a core ‘article of faith’ battle line the libs using the ETS that comes along rarely in politics. Me thinks if this is not the issue then there will be another and the target is not the Labour Party but Turnbull who is generally not believed to be a true conservative or liberal either.
All in all the whole episode has been a remarkably frank insight into the factions within Australian conservative politics at the moment and an indicator of how tenuous Turnbull’s hold of the Federal Parliamentary leadership is in reality. This rucous is but a foretaste of more to come.
But John, to quote the Potty Peer:
“So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year because they’d captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel peace laureate. Of course he’ll sign it!”
So John, in your assertion that Monckton wasn’t claiming Copenhagen would usher in a global socialist dictatorship (aka “a communist world government on the world”), did you bother to do any basic fact checking, or did were you just “confident in your independent judgement”?
Stephen Colbert has a name for confident, independent judgement like that. Perhaps you could acquaint your confident, independent judgement with some basic science before posting about global warming again.
To quote the American Institute of Physics History of Climate Change Science:
“In 1859 John Tyndall, intrigued by the recently discovered ice ages, took to studying how gases may block heat radiation. Since the work of Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that the atmosphere might hold in the Earth’s heat. The conventional view nevertheless was that gases were entirely transparent. Tyndall tried that out in his laboratory and confirmed it for the main atmospheric gases, oxygen and nitrogen, as well as hydrogen.
He was ready to quit when he thought to try another gas that happened to be right at hand in his laboratory: coal-gas. This was a fuel used for lighting (and Bunsen burners), produced industrially by heating coal. It consisted of carbon monoxide (CO) mixed with a bit of the hydrocarbon methane (CH4) and more complex gases. Tyndall found that for heat rays, the gas was as opaque as a plank of wood. Thus the industrial revolution, intruding into Tyndall’s laboratory in the form of a gas-jet, declared its significance for the planet’s heat balance.
Tyndall immediately went on to study other gases, finding that carbon dioxide gas (CO2) and water vapor in particular also block heat radiation. Tyndall figured that besides water and CO2, “an almost inappreciable mixture of any of the stronger hydrocarbon vapors” such as methane would change the climate.(1)”
Refuted by a scientific paper 150 years old. Epic fail, Tony G. Epic fail.
@Tony G,
“Climate science or AGW fraud cannot be tested and hence it is not scientific. There are no climate science experiments that predict the outcome of a future observation. There are no Climate science experiments that are repeatable in the laboratory and hence that prove the theory. There are not 2 containers with 1million parts of atmosphere, one with 313ppm of carbon and the other with 383ppm of carbon, demonstrating the change in the “net irradiance”. Until climate science or AGW fraud produce an experiment DEMONSTSRATING the change in the “net irradiance” STFU.”
Talking points, no matter how well crafted, can’t handle reality:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument-part-ii/
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/papers-on-earths-radiation-budget/
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/papers-on-carbon-dioxide-absorption-properties-in-atmosphere/
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/papers-on-changes-in-olr-due-to-ghgs/
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/papers-on-laboratory-measurements-of-co2-absorption-properties/
@James
James – amazing. Reminds me of other epic fails that had their champions at the time. The world is not flat and the sun and other planets do not revolve around the earth.
@Tony G
“Science is about experiments that predict the outcome of a future observation. This is the “testing” part of science.
Climate science or AGW fraud cannot be tested and hence it is not scientific. There are no climate science experiments that predict the outcome of a future observation. There are no Climate science experiments that are repeatable in the laboratory and hence that prove the theory. There are not 2 containers with 1million parts of atmosphere, one with 313ppm of carbon and the other with 383ppm of carbon, demonstrating the change in the “net irradiance”. Until climate science or AGW fraud produce an experiment DEMONSTSRATING the change in the “net irradiance”
Ok, then lets take the basic theory of AGW and put it to some tests. The basic theory – CO2 levels in the atmosphere (ignoring the other GH gases for now) have increased due to human causes and will cause warming of the global environment
CO2 has risen – Test. Compare current measurements with analysis of Ice Cores. Confirmed. Monitor current levels of CO2 and look for a rising trend. Confirmed
CO2 is Anthropogenic. Test. Analyse the change in isotope ratios of Carbon 12, 13 & 14 in the atmosphere. If the extra CO2 is anthropogenic in origin then the change in these ratios the atmosphere will match the expected impact of the isotope makeup of fossil fuels since no other source of CO2 can have that impact on the ratios. Confirmed
CO2 will cause an increase in the temperature. Atmosphere has warmed. Confirmed. Ice has melted. Confirmed. Oceans have warmed. Confirmed. Total Heat Content for the environment has increased since 1950 by around 2 x 10^23 Joules, most of it in the oceans. Thats about 3 Billion Hiroshima Bombs. So Heating from some source Confirmed. Could Total Solar Irradiance have increased as the source of this extra heat. No, satellite measurements for around 30 years rule this out. The Sun is going through its normal 11 year cycles but is not trending up. Direct measurement of Total Terrestrial Irradiance has been attempted but the results are inconclusive to date. However if net energy has increased and energy in has not, then energy out must have decreased. And plans are underway to launch new satellite missions that will be capable of simultaneous measurement of both sides of the balance sheet. So, the climate has warmed due to something other than changes in Solar output. Confirmed unless you feel we need to re-prove the Law of Conservation of Energy or the rules of arithmatic.
Is the change in Terrestial Irradiance due to CO2 etc.
Prediction. The radiation leaving the Earth will have increasing troughs in the frequencies where CO2 and the other GH gases absorb. Observed. Confirmed.
Prediction. The radiation reaching the earth when we look up will have increasing peaks in the frequencies where CO2 and the other GH gases absorb, due to them re-emitting the radiation they have absorbed and emitting some of it back down to the surface of the planet. Observed. Confirmed.
So there is definitely a change in Total Terestrial Irradiance. And an expected change in absorbtion/radiation behaviour in the frequencies of the GH gases has been observed. But we are not yet able to measure the TTI accurately enough yet to confirm the arithmatic precisely.
Tony. Do you do jigsaw puzzles. Have you noticed that you can usually make out the picture in the puzzle even though the very last piece hasn’t been added yet.
We haven’t been able to dot every i yet. But we certainly have enough confirmation to be getting on with business. And certainly no failures of confirmation.
As for your statement that Science is about experimentation. It isn’t. Its about observation. Make predictions of one or more phenomena or events that you expect to observe under certain conditions then see if you actually do observe them under those conditions. Experiment is a subset of this where you are able to contrive the conditions. Put something in a test tube or a stress tester for example. Many areas of science make predictions where you are unable to contrive the conditions for the test but simply have to wait for them to come about. Einstein’s Relativity Theory predicted that light from a distant star would be bent around the Sun if it passed near to it. But nobody went out to put the Sun in a test tube in a lab. Rather you wait for a solar eclipse to happen, sail to the South Atlantic to observe it and make your observation. Theory confirmed. Controlled condition laboratory testing is only one part of how Science is carried out. Real world Science is a lot more complex than your average grade 10 Science class.
And but your allegation of “AGW fraud ” suggest to me that you aren’t quite the impartial seeker after truth. Correct me if I am wrong about that.
@Glenn Tamblyn
Glen – brilliant analysis – but such a waste on a dedicated fruit loop! (Expect the expected fruit loop response.)
Thank you Tony G for inspiring James and Glenn, theirs was great stuff!
“Whoops. Monckton didn’t “claim that Copenhagen will usher in a global socialist dictatorship” Ian, that’s one of those “silly talking points” Quiggin refers to, he claimed that the (now shelved) Copenhagen treaty would sign away part of our sovereignity to an unelected world body, which it would.”
http://bigironbegfish.blogspot.com/2009/10/just-wow.html
Here’s a transcript of Monckton’s comments.
” At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.
I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.
How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.”
You’re right he doesn’t say “social dictatorship” he says “communist world government.’
And here’s the video:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/16/obama-poised-to-cede-us-sovereignty-in-copenhagen-claims-british-lord-monckton/
Tell me again which of us is the gullible fool who believes whatever he’s told and which of us checks facts for himself.
The most amusing conspiracy theory I have heard so far is that the whole AGW fraud was invented so that the extreme left could tax people heavily to pay for their stimulus packages. How prescient of these conspirators to have predicted the GFC and the need for stimulus packages (which we know were never really needed).