As I hinted in my post on the Senate Committee on Emissions Trading, Senator Ron Boswell went pretty much ballistic when I said that people who rejected the science of climate change had nothing useful to contribute to the debate. I was a bit surprised at his vehemence, but it turns out there was a good reason. Along with Barnaby Joyce, Boswell is launching Ian Plimer’s latest contribution to the delusionist literature
[1].

Comments from me, David Karoly, Ian Lowe and Ben McNeil .

To restate the conclusion of my last Fin column,

Until conservatives adopt a reality-based approach to climate change, as they have done in Europe and the UK, they cannot be taken seriously as an alternative government.

fn1. I don’t think anyone has yet had the patience to work through and identify all the errors in this deplorable work, but Tim Lambert has identified a couple of dozen Made of Honor hd . For anyone willing to be convinced, the fact that Plimer includes a graph from Martin Durkin’s ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’ which was so obviously wrong that even Durkin had to withdraw it is a pretty good measure of the level of scholarship Plimer has devoted to this.

The Senate Committee of Inquiry into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme held hearings in Brisbane today, and I gave evidence, based on the submission I posted a while back. As always, an interesting experience. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the whole event, but the witness before me (operator of a meat processing plant) made the interesting point that, for grass-fed cattle, the methane emissions about which we have heard so much are offset by the carbon sequestration associated with eating grass, which then regrows.

The hearing went pretty well, though there was a minor blowup with Ron Boswell when I said something scathing about the fact that those who rejected the science were had been taken seriously in Australia far longer than in the UK or Europe. None of the other conservative party Senators bit on this one (not that it was meant as a provocation, just a factual observation).

The continuing influence of delusional thinking, when combined with the need to deny any such influence whenever pressed on it, was a big problem for Nelson, continues to be a big one for Turnbull. And given the strength of delusionist defence mechanisms (on view in the thread regarding the fraudulent Climate Coalition) it’s hard to see how it’s going to be resolved any time soon. Unfortunately, Labor is not 100 per cent free of these types, and their influence on policy outcomes, while greatly reduced, remains both real and damaging.

Update In comments, Barry Brook and others offer a pretty complete demolition of the grass sequestration argument. By the time we have eaten the cows there is no net sequestration to offset the methane emissions.

Back in the 1990s, before the Internet created the self-sustaining parallel universe now inhabited by Republicans and their sympathisers, the task of casting doubt on climate science fell to a group of thinktanks and lobby groups. The most active was the Global Climate Coalition, funded by an array of industry groups, notably including motor and oil companies. Since climate delusions never die, a large number of the factoids now circulating among those who absurdly refer to themselves as “skeptics” can be traced back to the GCC and its FUD machine.

As reported by the New York Times, a recent court case allows us a peek behind the curtain at the (now-disbanded GCC). It turns out that even as the Global Climate Coalition was promoting delusional claims, its own scientists were advising that they would not stand up to scrutiny.

You might think that a chapter-and-verse demonstration of how the trick was performed might shock some self-styled “sceptics” into the realisation that they had displayed credulous gullibility. But at this point delusionists are like believers in alien-generated crop circles. It doesn’t matter if the tricksters who made the circles confess, and even show how it was done. As George Bush might have said of these guys “Fool them once, and they stay fooled”.