Piers Akerman, Climate Change Re-dux again, Clive Spash, and the terror of lies ...

(Above: has the end of the world already started? Do the movies provide clues or should we turn to Piers Akerman?)

It wouldn't be Sunday without a bit of biff from Piers Akerman, which perhaps explains why this Sunday in Sydney is a dour, miserable rain-infested attempt to evoke the worst of spring.

PM's bid to gag climate change sceptics, is the header, and of course it heralds an impossible task, since gagging Akker Dakker would be a bit like trying to put a gag in the mouth of a relentless eating machine roughly equivalent to a killer shark or a raptor.

Gag the noisiest climate change denier in loon pond, with the interminable, never ending squawking and flapping and honking and deriding? In your dreams, no quiet in this part of the pond.

Akerman is outraged of course, that Chairman Rudd should attack Akker Dakker and those like him, as if an attack is an attempt to gag or silence, when of course it's neither. It's simply an attempt to shout over the noise coming from that corner of the pond.

Never mind, Akker Dakker can shout back at Chairman Rudd, and vice versa, and the fat owl - notorious for his remarkable lack of scientific credentials - can trot out his usual bunch of sceptics and deniers, with talk of humbug and science gone awry. This week's it's David Bellamy's turn - surely best known for turning up in The Goodies - but then it gets interesting when the fat owl gets down to doing a Billy Bunter about the beastly treatment dished out to CSIRO scientist Clive Spash.

Now if you didn't read Akker Dakker with care, you might think that Spash is another sceptic, silenced and gagged by Chairman Rudd and the CSIRO.

But if you head off to Clive Spash's personal web page, here, it seems that Spash is a full on believer:

Eleven of the past 12 years were the warmest on record, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) are higher than at anytime over the past 650,000 years and glacier melt threatens the availability of water to 500 million people in South Asia and 250 million people in China. So reports the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet the world has failed to act despite such outcomes having been predicted for 20 years or more. Could part of the reason be that economists have been fiddling to produce figures recommending inaction while the planet gets set to burn? (here).

Or could it be because of the valiant efforts of Akker Dakker and the like?

Oh no, say it ain't so. It seems that the recent spat about Spash's unpublished paper is because it's about the best policies and mechanisms to combat climate change's impact on the earth, not about the reality of human induced climate change. Perhaps I've read him wrong, but Spash seems to be demanding stronger and different responses than those planned by the current government.

Well we've provide the link, and now you decide.

That said, I don't think much of the CSIRO's attempt to muzzle Spash. Come to think of it, I don't like it at all, echoing as it does the behavior towards government funded scientists and institutions in the dark days of the Howard and Bush years.

But I like even less Akerman's dragooning of Spash into Akker Dakker's cause, along with a resonant line about Spash being gagged as if he was a climate sceptic:

... the Rudd government, through the CSIRO, has gone down the extraordinarily dangerous path of muzzling scientists who disagree with its political views.

In gagging Dr Clive Spash, a senior environmental economist who argued that Rudd Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was an ineffective way to cut emissions, the CSIRO, Science Minister Kim Carr and the Prime Minister have engaged in an appalling display of anti-scientific action.

Stifling scientific discussion in favour of the government line is the sort of behaviour Nazi, Communist and Islamist governments engaged in, not the models for liberal West-ern democracies.

Spash has said his paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, is a dispassionate analysis of ETS policies and is not partisan.

He was told in February he could publish the work if it were peer-reviewed. In July, after it had been cleared for publication, the CSIRO told him it could not be published.

Spash has now been told he can’t publish the paper - even in a private capacity - because it is "politically sensitive’’.

Furthermore, the CSIRO has attempted to win brownie points with the Government, which controls its purse strings, by disquieting attempts to intimidate him.

Spash says he received a letter outlining a list of trivial instances in which he was accused of breaching CSIRO policy, giving as an example a claim he had not completed a leave form properly.

“We are scientists who are supposed to be discussing research in an open forum,’’ he told The Australian. "I am totally happy to have my work criticised and debated, but I’m not happy to have it suppressed.’’

The credibility of the CSIRO, which once enjoyed a fine international reputation for its research, has been dealt a body blow by the Rudd government.

Yes, you goose, but what is Spash on about, and would you like his message, thoughts and policy proposals, in any other forum at any other time, or would you dismiss him as a climate change hysteric, part of a dangerous religious cult?

At no point in this dragooning of Spash into his own rant, does Akerman acknowledge that Spash is a very different bird, and wearing a very different plumage to that of the fat owl. By implication and omission, you might get the impression that Spash is up there the likes of Bellamy as a 'gagged' scientist who's jumped the shark.

Here's Sparsh critiquing the Stern report, and suggesting ways in which Stern falls short (pdf here):

A new economics is required in which human well-being is addressed as a multifaceted concept which involves a plurality of values. Poverty in less industrially developed economies is not solved by supplying more luxuries to the already wealthy. Traditional “pro-growth” policies fail to address the problems humanity faces, the necessary transition or the nature of widespread environmental change we are undertaking. All these realisations raise the question of economic activity “for what?”.

The orthodox economic approach actually undermines much of what is good in the Stern report by diverting attention away from the value conflicts, distributional and ethical issues, treatment of strong uncertainty and surprise events, and handing over the entire debate to economic modellers and a discourse based upon monistic universally commensurable numbers. No longer is the issue about avoiding harm of the innocent or how we structure the economy without destroying the environment for future generations, but rather how much consumption growth will be affected in rich (and poor?) countries. The problem is framed as one of profitable returns on an investment not precaution to avoid a disaster. At the end of the day the Stern report is a standard economic approach to weighing up costs and benefits on the basis of over simplification, adopting narrow ethical positions and sidelining much of what the authors themselves state is important to consider.

Did Akker Dakker bother to read one word of Spash or what he's on about, before writing his dissembling piece of tosh? For a start, the use of words like multi-faceted and plurality would have sent him into a frenzy. No, this is what he settles for:

This is his (Rudd's) moment of truth, and he chooses to deny science and silence those who speak out.

Bah humbug, what a fraud and a fool, and a devious, deceptive one at that.

But Akker Dakker is always sporting, and he does offer up one last laugh, when he derides Chairman Rudd for playing the terror card:

He is dedicated to putting up the cost of everything, when no other nation is doing so, in a useless bid to garner world attention and feed his overwhelming vanity.

He is gambling with a hand that holds just one card: terror.

He hopes he, the extremist Left and the darkest Greens can terrify us into supporting a tax that will kill the economic future for generations of Australians.

Yep, week after week we're told about the terror - as the fat owl terrifies us all with his terror-soaked announcements that we're all doomed and we're all going to succumb to hysteria and be permanently unemployed, and our children withered and dead. Here he is back in August:

Having successfully avoided legislating on the basis of religious beliefs for more than a century, Australia, under the Rudd government is now going to be hobbled with a new job-destroying scheme of wealth redistribution designed to win the votes of those who have succumbed to neo-Romantic Green hysteria. (here).

And week after week since then the same terror is laid out, typed out, for all of us to marvel at this persistent, relentless fear-mongering - disaster, unemployment (when Wall Street was managing that ever so well all by itself), mad religious beliefs, scientists worst than Catholics, corrupt empire builders, nasty greens and shocking hysteria, and job destruction leading to the end of western civilization before even the Islamics can manage it.

In conclusion? There's only one mindless terrorist in this game, and that's Akker Dakker himself, ignorant, bumbling and wilfuly refusing to read those whom he deploys to prop up his monotonous chant.

This one note Charlie never changes his tune, and it occurs to me that if you end up reading Akerman on a regular basis you must develop a mind in tune with a minimalism more stringent than that offered by Riley, Reich and Glass. By golly, I'm going to head back to watch Transformers 2 again - that Michael Bay put a lot more depth into his portrait of women in the epic struggle between good and bad 'bots than I realized at first glance. Oh dear, I've been reading Akker Dakker. Already the world is blurring, taste and discernment are getting blurry, the room is getting darker, everything's turning black, feeling dizzy, and I must scream ... but have no mouth ...

Meantime, I've decided to cut back on reading Akker Dakker on climate change. It's too rich, too much cholesterol, and too filling, and what happens when you realize a score by John Cage makes more sense? Oh if only we could get 4'33" of silence in loon pond ...