Friday, October 13, 2017

In which Maley produces remarkable climate science malevolence ...



The cagey reptiles have lately taken to dropping in little essays on pet themes late in the day, no doubt to provide a little click bait with some handsome trolling, and to avoid, elude and frustrate the pond, and so the pond almost missed this piece by the remarkable Maley ...



In his Clark Kent persona, Maley passes as the national security editor for the lizard Oz, which means his usual turf is cops carrying machine guns, border chiefs waiting judgment, terror cash, jihadi wannabes and so on ...

Yet for some reason he and other reptiles decided the time was right for a meditation on the onion muncher, a kind of mea culpa for having pandered to a climate denialist ...

The result more than satisfies Alice's insatiable lust for the curiouser ...



Uh huh. Curious.

It didn't take long for the mask to be ripped away. It's just another stage in the strategic retreat. Out of the onion muncher wreckage Maley manages to retrieve a "thoughtful speech that deserved to be taken seriously."

Oh FFS.

The pond has been through the various stages of reptile climate denialism many times, and it seems this cartoon now badly needs updating ...



We need another panel which might read...

OK, there is climate change, a small portion of it might even be person made, but if a climate denialist gives a speech that sends climate denialist Bolter into raptures, it's a "thoughtful speech that deserves to be taken seriously."

To give comfort to the denialists, Maley goes through all kinds of verbal contortions ...



Just roll that one around on the tongue: "the theory of how greenhouse gases warm the earth is plausible."

What a futtock.

Plausible?

Who let him out of science class? Won't someone send him Greg Hunting here?

A greenhouse gas (abbrev. GHG) is a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. This process is the fundamental cause of the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Without greenhouse gases, the average temperature of Earth's surface would be about −18 °C (0 °F),[2] rather than the present average of 15 °C (59 °F).  In the Solar System, the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan also contain gases that cause a greenhouse effect.

If you think the theory of gravity has some level of certainty, try a little thought experiment, like stripping the earth of its greenhouse gases, and then see how plausible you feel.

The question isn't about the plausibility of greenhouse gases, the question revolves around human activities and the impact of anthropogenic carbon dioxide ... and that includes the reptiles' religious fervour for coal ...



And after this doozy, Maley decides to let the onion muncher off his climate denialism and his obscurantism ...



Who knows, maybe even the Bolter isn't a climate denialist, though the rapturous way he greeted the onion muncher's denialist speech was something to see ...

Maley can't say the onion muncher is a climate denialist? Continue to let the children suffer ...



Refusing to state the bleeding obvious is just another way that the malicious, malevolent Maley goes the fudge ...

Climate deniers? The pond is saying that the onion muncher is one. 

He's passed through many forms on climate science, but now he's back to the original caterpillar that announced his profound insight to a bunch of farmers back in 2009 ...


Perhaps "climate science is crap" is a bit too subtle and nuanced an argument for Maley.

The reptiles published at lavish length the onion muncher's latest bout of climate denialism ... here's a decent denialist-laden excerpt ...



It seems clear cut - the denialism - though back in 2014 David Pope put it another way ..



And now with a hop and a skip and a jump, we may move past the climate denialism, courtesy Maley, to take the onion muncher seriously ...




Indeed, indeed, what if we fuck the planet and ruin the lives of millions? Who cared about the Great Barrier Reef anyway?

Well, there's always a sucker for this sort of equivocating half-baked, fudging sort of climate denialism of the Lomborgian kind, dressed up as reasoned and rational debating points, asking awkward questions that would send the climate lobby into a bout of volcanic goat-worshipping religiosity ...

Right on cue, Leigh Sales from their ABC thought it was the right time for a tweet in support of the malevolent Maley ...


The pond really does sometimes despair of their ABC ... but Sales managed to set the twitterati off in a way that the trolling reptiles hadn't managed ...


The pond was happy ... it could slip in a few cartoons from Pope, showing just how long the reptiles had kept the climate denialism kicking along in terms of policy discussions ...


There were any number of other twittering comments ...


Indeed, indeed, and the pond has a goodly supply of old Pope ...


And still the tweets flowed like shale oil around dinosaurs ...




Indeed, indeed.

After all that, it's a close run thing as to who emerged looking the silliest ... Maley or Sales ... but the pond settled for the advice to eat an onion and everything would look different ...

Never mind, Maley has done sterling work for the lizard Oz ... and he scored one all-day sucker, and now we've reached another stage in the long reptile march ...




The pond suggests Maley or one of the head honcho reptiles approach Pope - more nicely BBQ'd papal offerings here - and ask him if they could just alter this cartoon a little and use it for the masthead. 

It wouldn't take much  changing... instead of "Australie", it only has to say "The Australian", a much easier makeover than "Their silly tweeting ABC" ...



8 comments:

  1. James Goldie: "...basic Qs around the causes and severity of climate change have been asked and investigated for literal decades..."

    Actually James, for more than a century. See Svante Arrhenius back in 1896:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

    And that's what's meant by averring that the [basic] science "is settled".

    Of course the main problem is that the really critical factor is not even minimally settled: human population. Back when Arrhenius did his thing the estimated world population was 1.65 billion. Back in 1950 it was 2.5 billion (0.9 billion increase in 50 years) and now it is nearly 7.5 billion (nearly 5 billion increase in 67 years).

    If we'd somehow managed to stay at around 2.5 billion, we could still be burning fossil fuels fairly carelessly for quite a few decades to come. But now ...

    Considering anthropogenic climate change only from a GHG point of view is simply avoiding the real issue.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree, perhaps people should do a cost to benefit analysis on having children. I think this is why fertility rates go down as income goes up. If you don't need children to care for you in your dotage & your not likely to lose a few to preventable disease you don't need to breed as much.

      Look at the thematic world map on this doco - its as obvious as climate change. It's also interesting that religious belief doesn't play as much role as some of it's adherents believe.

      http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/fertility/world-fertility-patterns-2015.pdf

      Delete
    2. The world's population is projected to reach approximately 9.7 billion by 2050 (and Australia to add about 9 million to reach about 33.5 million by then). So that's only an additional 2.3 billion or so worldwide in 33 years - ie about half the time it took for nearly 5 billion extra, so the rate of increase isn't dropping much.

      And that figure of 9.7 billion contains projections such that China's population (supposedly 1.4 billion by 2020) will have dropped to 1.34 billion by 2050, India (about 1.4 billion by 2020) will have increased to only 1.7 billion by 2050 and Indonesia (271 million by 2020) will have increased to only 288 million by 2050.

      Oh yeah, that's all totally believable, isn't it. How long does everybody think we can go on ignoring the herd of mammoths in the room ?

      Anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_future_population_(United_Nations,_medium_fertility_variant)

      Delete
    3. Somethings gonna break. If humans have the choice between managing a problem or letting it run until they have a catastrophic failure you know what they will do!

      Delete
    4. Hmmm. Maybe some day I'll expound on GrueBleen's 'Law of Minimum Necessary Discomfort' which, in summary, states that to begin to fix any problem, the "right people" (ie the appropriately powered ones) must feel some (minimum necessary) level of discomfort.

      The only ones now feeling much discomfort - apart from a bunch of freshly de-housed hurricane victims who are totally powerless - are the insurance companies. And their discomfort hasn't reached the minimum necessary level yet, and they're pretty much powerless too.

      But just wait until increased storm activity and rising seas drive all those American oligarchs out of their east coast estates and mansions ...

      Delete
  2. Where would you start - scientific method? risk? proof? It's like someone that doesn't understand basic maths trying to learn calculus.

    Grundle over at Crikey makes a nice little analogy to cancer treatment that even the ill-informed might follow - "When one of those primitives who spent 20 years worshipping oncology at medical school tells you you’ve got it, you may get a second or third opinion, but you don’t get 97 of them, and then, the 98th saying it’s indigestion, refuse treatment".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can't start anywhere, they aren't, and won't, listen to you. Abbott is basically just repeating the whole bunch of ignorant and irrational denier memes and tropes that can be found any day of the week on the Watts Up With That? site.

      I won't link to the site, you can greghunt it yourself if you feel irrational enough.

      But I do find it curious that Australia which contributes about 1.24% of the world CO2 output - with about 0.32 % of the world population - is way ahead of Tones' birth nation the UK which only contributes 1.11% of world CO2 with 0.78% of world population. It must be all those coal powered generating plants that the pommies don't have.

      Delete
  3. Hi Dorothy,

    Here is recent study that is a bit more than just a thought experiment;

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/forming-the-earths-coal-almost-turned-the-planet-into-a-snowball/

    Ironic that the mighty forests that would become the Reptile's favourite fuel could take up so much CO2 (not Co2 as an idiot Murdochian denotes it) out of the atmosphere it nearly froze the entire planet.

    Now we are pouring all that captured carbon right back into the atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong?

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete

Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.