Isn’t that gambling with our future?
He’s betting that a UN committee is not biased, that it would honestly announce any findings that went against the claim of “crisis”. He’s betting that massive one-sided funding to find a crisis has not influenced the outcome, and that if there were major natural causes of climate change that overrode the artificial ones, they would be given just as high a priority, without having dedicated institutes to find those answers and without having up to $7 billion in related funding each year to search for those answers.
The UN bureaucrats soak in their fame and their prestige. Why wouldn’t they? The Copenhagen meeting is the 15th international conference in 15 years for promoters of the climate-crisis. Bureaucrats score two weeks with 10,000 friends in an exotic locale every year. They get Nobel prizes for just doing their jobs, and the promise that they might be at the centre of new world financial market: dinner with Obama and tea with Gordon Brown. Status knocks, and everyone is home. The IPCC is not going to issue a press release saying that carbon has only a minor effect. The bigger the “crisis” the higher their “status”.
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This global gravy train got rolling in 1988 and when the evidence turned “180 degrees”, the train ran off the tracks. When the data came in, it all went against the theory. From 1999-2003, the ice-core results turned out to show that carbon rises 800 years after temperatures. From 1979-1999, the radiosondes showed that the clouds and humidity do not give the positive feedback the IPCC was counting on. In 2003, the Hockey-stick graph was exposed to be inept, dishonest, and fatally flawed.
The advocates of action against the theoretical crisis meet every request for evidence with intimidation. It’s as if calling someone a “denier” negates more than 100,000 radiosonde readings and 6,000 boreholes, 30 years of satellite results and ice cores that go back 400,000 years - a time before homo sapiens was sapien. These things are evidence, but a manufactured “consensus” from a self serving committee is not. “Denier” is an insult, a cheap attempt to bully dissent into submission.
In the strangest passages, Rudd repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he doesn’t point out how any of them are wrong.
Rudd assumes people will be convinced that Liberals are crazy if he quotes them saying tritely obvious things like this line from Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin who said:
CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant ... This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.
Which was the perfect point for Rudd to name the evidence and show how Minchin was wrong. It shows he mistakenly thinks just making any point against the hallowed theory is a flaw in itself.
Rudd quotes Turnbull who says, "I think most people have at least some doubts about the science."
Which is not exactly diabolical stuff. Climate science is so complex, that the classic example for Chaos theory talks about how a butterfly might create a storm. Hence, it seems rather irrational to state anything other than what Turnbull said. Could we imagine a complex science where most people said they had no doubts? It’s not like Turnbull is making a gaffe, like paying tribute to the Ku Klux Klan or accidentally suggesting “the sun rises in the west”. Instead this is Turnbull showing he’s is not an automaton robot arm of the IPCC.
It’s as if being sceptical is a bad thing, yet on a scientific topic, where there are billions of dollars of vested interests, anyone who believes without asking any sceptical questions is gullible.
At the bottom of all this is the false idea that science is consensus. Indeed the idea of consensus was deplored by great scientists. All revolutionary thinkers of their day had to break the “consensus” by definition. Rudd exposes his flawed reasoning when he lets slip that the sceptics are those “who do not accept the scientific consensus”. No absolutely we do not. We stand by Galileo, Aristotle and Einstein. We demand evidence, and not just opinions.
It’s a sad indictment of what intelligent discourse in Australia has been reduced to. The nation that invented the bionic ear considers sacrificing its economy because they uncritically accept the views of a UN committee, and are unwilling to even converse with people who are concerned citizens, retired scientists, and active professors, who can show how the UN view has been definitively proven wrong (and with references). Rudd prefers to demonise them as “deniers”. If he really wanted to win over the sceptics, all he has to do is provide empirical evidence. Committee pronouncements are not convincing.
Rudd undoubtedly thought that the “climate change” issue would neatly wedge the Opposition and possibly cement his place in history. As polls show electors are rapidly cooling on the issue, Rudd is clearly frustrated. He may not realise yet, that his unquestioning faith in authorities has placed him out on a limb. The IPCC have done him no favours by giving him only half the story. But ultimately, Rudd needed to do his own homework on the topic before he pinned his leadership on it.
The bullying must stop. Rudd needs to apologise for baseless attacks on all the scientists who have been trying to warn him and help him understand our climate. Most of us work unpaid as a service to help the country and for the cause of science.
Bullying is not science. There is never an excuse. Name-calling is not evidence.
Is it not too much to ask that our Prime Minister could speak politely and then pay attention to the evidence?
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